This detail comes from Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto's 16th century painting The Abduction of Helen, which I saw a few years ago at an exhibit of his work on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from the Prado Museum in Madrid. Here, we see Tintoretto's vision of what Christopher Marlowe described as "the face that launched a thousand ships" in his play Doctor Faustus. I will get to Marlowe in my next blog post, but for now let us talk about Herodotus's Helen. Like her half-brother Heracles, that other famous mortal offspring of Zeus, Helen will provide another recurring mythological motif in The Histories, including a significant discussion in Book 2, which I will preview at the end of this post.
In Book 1, Herodotus follows up the Phoenician abduction of Io and the Greek abductions of Europa and Medea with the most famous abduction of them all, that of Helen of Sparta by Paris, son of Priam and prince of Troy, the inciting incident for the entire Epic Cycle. Homer does not describe the specifics of the abduction, or seduction, in his Iliad, which only relates incidents towards the close of the ten year Trojan War anyway. Helen herself is back in Sparta at the side of her husband Menelaus by the time of Homer's Odyssey. Presumably, the abduction would have formed the main plot of the lost Cypria, although this is conjecture. As for Herodotus, he dispenses with any mythological notions of goddesses, golden apples, or the "Judgement of Paris." Herodotus's Paris conceives the plan to steal the Spartan queen for himself as a direct response to the Greek refusal to return Medea to Colchis.
Zooming out on the full Tintoretto painting, we can see that artist has interpreted the scene as a literal abduction rather than the often imagined seduction. This Helen is not following Paris willingly as in some iterations, but instead Paris is trundling her into the boat like so much cargo as pandemonium erupts in the scene behind them. The Trojan sailors are rushing to set off as the Spartans make pursuit. Helen's absence must have been noticed right away in Tintoretto's vision, otherwise Paris just shamelessly dragged her to his ship in broad daylight. The colorful tumult in the background foreshadows the chaos to come in the Trojan War.
The next few posts will discuss the Trojan War in the context of The Histories. Herodotus will come back to this abduction in Book 2, where he more or less agrees with the theory that Helen waited out the duration of the war in Egypt. Since I talked about Euripides's Medea in my previous post, I'm not going to wait until Book 2 to at least mention his Helen. What I find super fun about the plays of Euripides is that he did not stick to a single mythological canon within his oeuvre. His version of events changes depending on the needs of the play. So while in The Trojan Women, Helen is present at the fall of Troy, she is in Egypt in the other play. Of course, since Helen's husband Menelaus initially retrieves a phantom apparition of his wife from Troy in Helen, we could conjecture that this phantom is the character that appears on stage in The Trojan Women, although this theory would lessen the dramatic impact of that masterpiece. However, this would explain the personality differences between the two Helens, the phantom being an expert manipulator and the "real" Helen a loyal wife. In the end, once Menelaus has found Helen in Egypt, the phantom vanishes into thin air.
To make matters more confusing, this is definitely not the Helen from Homer's Odyssey, who clearly remembers the events from the Trojan War and describes them in depth to Odysseus's son Telemachus when he visits Sparta in the opening books of the epic, although she has been to Egypt at some point to procure the potion of forgetfulness that makes life bearable for the battle scared war survivors of the war. So Homer, Herodotus, and Euripides all link Helen to Egypt, but all in different ways. Let's also remember that in The Histories, the abducted Io was taken by the pirates not back to their native Phoenicia, but to Egypt.
Helen is an oddity in Greek drama, not really a tragedy or a comedy. Certainly, The Trojan Women is the more popular play with contemporary directors, in part due to the clear antiwar themes. That Helen makes quite a persuasive speech to Menelaus that paints herself as a hapless victim in manner of the Tintoretto painting, but the subtext, and the rebuke against her by Paris's mother Hecuba, show that the Spartan queen may not be as innocent as she lets on. But that's a story for another blog post.
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