Of all times to go away, the prince chuckled to himself, Menelaus had chosen these very days. He was going off to Crete, for his grandfather Catreus’s funeral. As he left, Menelaus, serious as ever, told Helen to look after their guest. After that, there were absolutely no other men about. Helen and the prince were each sleeping alone in the same palace. In the emptiness of the palace halls, Aphrodite assembled those archons of desire Himeros and Pothos, and the Charites too. But on the visible plane, the person who acted as pimp was Aethra. Paris gripped Helen’s wrist. The Trojan’s escorts loaded up her riches and the things the prince had pretended were gifts. Paris stood tall on a chariot drawn by four horses. Helen was next to him, tunic tossed back over her shoulders, offering her body half naked to the night, where nothing could be seen but Eros’s dazzling torch twisting and turning in front of them. Behind the fleeing couple, another Eros was waving a torch. The two lovers and their escorts raced across the open space of red earth and scattered olive trees that led down from Sparta to the coast. Unnoticed among the Trojans, Aethra was with them too. On reaching the water, they saw a tiny island, a toy almost, just a few yards from the shore. On that island, as though on a huge bed covered with a green canopy of pine trees and surrounded by deep water, Helen spent her first night with her third lover.
Helen is the power of the phantom, the simulacrum — and the simulacrum is that place where absence is sovereign. Of her five husbands, the ones she loved most were Paris and Achilles. And, for both Paris and Achilles, Helen was a phantom before she was a woman. Ever since Aphrodite promised the shepherd of Ida that he would possess Helen of Sparta, that pure name had canceled out the powers and kingdoms Athena and Hera were offering him. Despite grim omens, the shepherd of Ida, now recognized as a prince, set off with galleys full of treasure toward that name.
As for Achilles, he was the only one of the Achaean leaders who hadn’t rushed off to Sparta to ask for Helen’s hand. He thus set off to a war he knew would end in death for him, for a woman about whom he knew nothing but her name. In nine years of siege, Achilles could have said no more about Helen than did Paris himself before he left Troy to find her: “Te vigilans oculis, animo te nocte videbam.” So much the longer, indeed never ending, would be their life together as phantoms on Leuke, island of white splendor.
Adrasteia, Moira, Tyche, Ananke, Ate, Aisa, Dike, Nemesis, Erinyes, Heimarmene: such are the names that embody necessity. And they are all women. While Kronos dreams, deep in ambrosia, and in his dreams calculates the measures of the universe, these women keep watch, making sure that every being plays his part, no more and no less, so that nothing and no one may exceed their established bounds. Yet all life is excess. That is why we find these women on the prowl everywhere. They are wet nurses, helmswomen, weavers, flitting, towering. They are all related: Dike and Ananke are daughters of Kronos. Dike is a priestess to Adrasteia. The Moirai and the Erinyes are sisters. They share a family resemblance, the family of destiny. They hail from that distant past when the only powers that existed were abstract and faceless or at most hybrid, compound creatures. They move “in the fog, in black cloud,” women’s torsos looming from balconies of smoke. And even these strange bodies come and go: Moira has temples, but without statues, where worshipers practice her cult; or sometimes she has statues, but without temples, where no cult is practiced. The more all-encompassing they are, like Ananke, the less they are represented. While the emissaries of necessity — the Erinyes, the Moirai, or Ate — are regular guests among men, beautiful even, when the nature of their work doesn’t make them terrifying, and they only talk among themselves.
One of these women did have a body that was both stable and very beautifuclass="underline" Nemesis. Rich, thick hair, white clothes. She always had a friend with her, Aidós. One day their names would be translated as Vengeance and Shame, but at the time we’re talking of, when they had only just emerged from the black cloud, their natures were far more complex and variegated. What did they have in common? The notion of offense. Aidós held people back from offending. Nemesis represented the ineluctable consequences of offending. They were united in a vision of life as something that gets wounded and then, as it writhes, wounds in its turn. Zeus began to watch Nemesis. Nothing like this had ever happened with the women of necessity: never had Zeus felt any desire for the bodies of Adrasteia, Moira, Tyche, Ananke, Aisa, or the Erinyes. And once, in his anger, he had even hurled Ate down from heaven. When it came to his amorous adventures, Zeus found mortal women far more attractive. He wasn’t interested in bothering those figures of fate; they were too similar to one another, disturbing the way twins can be, too ancient, and, in the end, hostile. But with Nemesis it was different. Something tremendous must have been at stake in that erotic conquest.
Never, for a woman, had Zeus traveled so far, crossing country after country, sea after sea, “beneath the earth, beneath the black, unfished waters,” and on and on to “the ends of the earth,” the watery snake, Oceanus. Stubborn and desperate, Nemesis transformed herself into all kinds of animals, while Zeus never let up following her. And when all the feather flapping was finally done, when atlas and zoology were exhausted, what was left? A wild goose and a swan. The swan settled on the goose and forced her to yield. Zeus “passionately united himself with her, out of powerful necessity.” But how bizarre! Nemesis, a figure of necessity, is overcome by necessity. And, as the swan assaults her, Nemesis, friend of Aidós, is “mentally torn apart aidoî kaì nemései” (which in too modern a translation might be rendered as “by shame and vengeance”). Thus, Nemesis is torn apart by herself. Offending us as it does with such paradoxes, this can hardly be one of Zeus’s usual adventures. But whenever his adventures are too grand, Zeus allows them to be repeated with variations, so that each version may possess a shining fragment of the truth. Such was the case with Nemesis.
Zeus spent half a night of love with Leda, leaving the other half to her husband, Tyndareos. During that night, Leda conceived four children, divided between heaven and earth: Helen and Pollux by Zeus, Clytemnestra and Castor by Tyndareos. That night was the delicate cameo and repetition of another night, at once dangerous and sublime, that Zeus had spent with Nemesis, as that other night with Nemesis was a delicate cameo and repetition of the long chase across the entire face of the earth that had ended in the violent coupling of swan and wild goose.
To seduce necessity: it had to be the most difficult of amorous undertakings. It was what men would later call a contradiction. And in fact Nemesis wasn’t interested in Zeus and rejected his imploring advances. What was needed was a trick, a divine trick. Zeus asked Aphrodite to help him. Together they agreed that Zeus would turn himself into a swan while Aphrodite, in the guise of an eagle, would pretend to follow him. Nemesis was making a sacrifice when she saw a splendid swan flapping toward her, exhausted. From the top of a nearby rock, an eagle was watching them, motionless and threatening, ready to spread its wings and dive on its prey. The frightened swan huddled against Nemesis’s lap. She didn’t reject the animal. She wanted to protect it from that menacing eagle. She fell asleep with the creature, squeezing it between her thighs. They slept. And Nemesis was still sleeping when the swan raped her. Then from Nemesis’ womb a white egg appeared. Hermes took it, carried it to Sparta, and placed it in Leda’s womb. When the big egg hatched, from inside the shell emerged a tiny, perfect female figure: Helen.