Read Helen of Troy for Free Online

laborious: it took Caxton between five and six months to print the 700-odd leaves of the book, but from this moment on, Helen would inhabit not just the popular imagination, but the mass media.
    Dante, Fra Angelico, Chaucer, Leonardo, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dryden, Goethe, Jacques-Louis David, Rossetti, Gladstone, Yeats, Berlioz, Strauss, Rupert Brooke, Camus, Tippett and Ezra Pound: all have kept the idea of Helen alive. Cultures have created their own Helens, consistent with their own ideals of beauty. She is irresistible because she is recondite. No model, no substitute, is ever quite good enough. Zeuxis’ answer was to manufacture a composite, but even that amalgam fails to satisfy. Because Helen is elusive, her appeal endures. She is prodigious, part of the cultural, and the political, make-up of the West.
Helen-Hunting

    They called me Helen. Let me tell you all the truth of what has happened to me.
    E URIPIDES ,
Helen
27
    A NCIENT AUTHORS TELL US that Helen travelled extensively through the Bronze Age world, zigzagging across Greece, besieged in Anatolia and journeying to Egypt. They believed that after her death her spirit lived on in the landscape.
    In Helen’s case, locations are particularly germane because we will never hear her voice, first hand, through textual evidence. Although the character of Helen derived from an epoch that used writing (an early form of Greek now called Linear B), the Linear B tablets that have survived – accidentally preserved when they were baked hard by the very fires that destroyed many Bronze Age palaces – deal with relatively mundane details of Bronze Age life. These are administrative lists, tallies of wine, pots, grain, oils and live-stock – the material culture that warrior-overlords controlled.
    The Linear B script is utilised primarily for bureaucracy. In the tablets dug up to date there is little that is immediately recognisable as the inner voice of a civilisation, no self-conscious historical record. 28 This is not a culture that employed written symbols as a form of emotional expression. For that, we have to wait until the reintroduction of writing around the time of Homer just after 800 BC . Greece in the 13th century BC , Helen’s age, still stands in pre-history.
    But Helen’s is a story of two civilisations – of Greeks and of Trojans. There are fuller written sources from the ‘other’ side. Paris, Helen’s Trojan lover, occupied territory in the Troad, the coastal buffer-zone, now in modern-day Turkey, which in pre-history sat at the edge of the Anatolian landmass dominated by the great Hittite Empire. At the turn of the 20th century, excavators in central Turkey uncovered a cache of Hittite texts: diplomatic treaties, ritual tablets, royal biographies, accounts of trade and conflict. Tens of thousands of inscriptions have since been discovered. Some are carved into rocks and along remote mountain passes, others are still being dug out of the earth. Many tablet fragments have lain, undeciphered, in museum storerooms since they were first excavated a hundred years ago. About seven thousand fragments have yet to be published: there are simplynot enough Hittite scholars, or research funds, to do the work. 29 These Hittite texts give an eastern perspective to the Troy story that has not been fully explored. If Helen is to be explored as a real woman as well as an icon, and in a Bronze Age context, then they are vital testimonies.

    Since recorded time, men have believed in Helen. They have believed in her both as an actual historical character and as an archetype of beauty, of womanhood, of sex, of danger. In my own pursuit of Helen, I will look not just at what she has come to mean, but what she meant to the populations of the past. I will explore the praxis of Helen, trying to imagine how she was experienced in antiquity and beyond, as men and women walked past her shrines, as they watched the priestesses of her cult inspect bloody entrails to