How much is fact, fiction, or legend about Helen of Troy?
Since entering the written record 2,700 years ago, Helen of Troy has been variously represented to yield a feistier figure, “a woman who is at times applauded, but more often damned, for being sexually active – and is, furthermore, branded a whore.”
DETAIL FROM “THE LOVE OF HELEN AND PARIS,” JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, 1788
Observes historian Bethany Hughes in her 2005 book
Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore: “Of all Helen’s roles in the literary and artistic corpus (and it is a long career – she has been forgotten by not a single generation since she entered the written record 2,700 years ago), it is her part as fantasy whore that has been most tenacious. Her many sexual partners – the hero Theseus, her husband Menelaus, her lover Paris, her second Trojan husband Deiphobus, and (some whispered) Achilles after both he and Helen were dead – are trotted out by ancient and modern authors alike as the gossip columns would the client-list of a high-class prostitute.”
Although there’s not a shred of evidence that a Bronze Age Helen bestowed sexual favors in return for booty, Hughes says, “equally there is no question that a Mycenaean aristocrat such as Helen would have received rich gifts from visiting foreign dignitaries – particularly from a city as wealthy as Troy.”
Hughes concludes: “Helen of Troy has been established as a primal whore, a deceiver – in a long line of sexually powerful women whose purpose is credited as being to bring down men, whose sex life is viewed as betrayal in pursuit of furtherment, perpetuating the ancient notion that female lust pollutes male intellect.”
Read “Helen the Whore and the Curse of Beauty” in the August 14, 2018 issue of HistoryToday.com now!
