The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble of Zeus’s reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen’s lifetime. It was a time marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men would go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out.
On their wedding night, when the bride and groom retired to their bedroom where the whitewash was still damp on the walls, Menelaus found his legs sluggish and his mind dazed. The long, nerve-racking courtship, the oath over the quartered horse, the honors, the festivals, the banquets — everything fused in one powerful impulse to flop down on his bed and sleep. Helen lay awake and thought of the friends who until a short while ago had been singing and dancing for her in the palace. They were a “band of young women,” two hundred and forty girls, who exercised along the river Eurotas, their bodies greased with oil like boys’. And now they would be thinking of her, as she, Helen, shared her bed with Menelaus for the first time.
The next morning, at dawn, those girls would gather water lilies near the meadows where they always went and weave them into a crown. Then they would go and hang the crown from the branches of a big plane tree, raising to the sky and abandoning to the breeze those flowers that had grown from slime. One of them would take out a golden cruet and, drop by drop, pour an oil used in funeral sacrifices over the tree. Others of them would carve on the bark “Worship me: I am Helen’s tree.” So Helen lay awake, through the night, fantasizing.
After the flight from Sparta, after the years of war in Troy, after the eventful return trip to Sparta, after the death of Menelaus, Helen found herself caught between two stepsons who loathed her: Nicostratus and Megapenthe. So she decided to run off again, alone this time, to seek refuge with a childhood friend. She sailed as far as Rhodes, which was ruled by Polyxo, a widow now, one of the many widows the Trojan War had left scattered across these islands. Helen was finally seeking refuge in a woman, in her memories of girlhood. Polyxo wanted to avenge her husband, Tlepolemus. Like so many other women, she blamed Helen for his death. But she greeted her with kindness.
For the first time in her life, Helen was not being pestered by men. One day she was lying, daydreaming, in the bath when some of Polyxo’s serving maids burst in disguised as Erinyes. They seized her, naked, fingernails digging into her flesh, dragged her dripping from the water, and carried her off. Outside they hung her from a tree. The big plane tree near Sparta would still bear the carved inscription “Worship me: I am Helen’s tree” when the people of Rhodes founded their temple to Helen Dendritis, Helen of the Tree, next to the plane tree where they had found her body hanging.
While they were fleeing Sparta, gusting winds forced Helen and Paris to land on the beach in Sidon. Thus it was that Leda’s white daughter and her lover came to seek refuge on the very beach where Europa had been carried off by the white bull. They then sailed on as far as Egypt, to the Canopic mouth of the Nile. “On that shore there was, and still is, a sanctuary to Heracles: if even the merest servant takes refuge there and marks himself with the sacred signs, thereby consecrating himself to the god, it is forbidden to touch him.” The two lovers felt they were safe. But there are people who always get to know everything, and look on unmoved: the Egyptian priests. Even as he interrogated the stranger, and Paris ducked his questions, Proteus, king of Memphis, had already heard the true story of the wandering lovers from the temple priests. At the end of his interrogation he passed judgment: he couldn’t have this criminal, Paris, killed, as he would have liked, because he was a foreigner and untouchable. But he would keep Helen and her riches. Paris could go back to Troy, but only with a phantom copy of her.
The way Herodotus saw it, Homer was perfectly aware of this episode in Helen’s story and lets us know as much when he speaks of “the Sidon women’s embroidered veils, which godlike Paris brought back across the vast sea from Sidon, on that voyage when he carried off the noble Helen.” But then why doesn’t the poet ever mention it? Especially when one considers how essential an element it is, because it means that the Trojans knew they didn’t have Helen within their walls at all, but only a phantom. For ten years the war had raged around an absent woman, whom the Trojans would have been more than happy to hand over to the Achaeans, if only they had actually had her. Why on earth did Homer keep quiet about that extraordinary fact in the events leading up to the war? Herodotus answers: “because this story was not suitable for epic composition.” It is an explanation that leaves us dumbfounded. So the centuries-old accusation against Homer, that he was a craftsman of deceit, turns out to be true, does it? For overridingly literary motives, Homer kept quiet about the supreme scandal of the Trojan War: that blood had been spilled for a woman who was not actually there, for an impalpable ghost. For hundreds, even thousands of years, the poet’s story would be repeated, prolonging to the end of time the deceit that took the heroes to their deaths beneath the walls of Troy. What treachery could have prompted Homer to do such a thing?
The epos, the epic poem, is a compact, reflecting surface, where the building bricks of formulaic locutions are laid one after the other. Homer did not want to reveal the secret about the nature of Helen, the fact that she was a phantom, because this would have created a vacuum in the surface of his poem. The name Helen must designate a being no less solid than the towering Diomedes. And it is precisely in this way that the phantom is sovereign, when it is hidden away, eating into the bodies from inside.
Homer foresaw his great future enemy: Plato, evoker of copies, of unstoppable cascades of copies that would flood the world. And illuminating those copies with the art of reason, Plato would try to dissolve Helen’s enchantment, the enchantment of the unique, in their profusion. But the unique Helen shines more brightly than any other, precisely because she hides the simulacrum within herself, her phantom and the twins she was born with. Faced with the flood of copies Plato released upon the world, the eye would retreat, overcome by an ultimate sense of bewilderment. After which, it would turn elsewhere, toward something invisible and secure, beyond, where the bodiless prototypes are at rest: the ideas. For the unique woman, Plato’s idea is a disaster, because it aims to replace her. The two look at each other sidelong, like rivals, ready for anything, each examining the other’s makeup. To defend herself, Helen relies on the brilliant surface, makes it throb as no other figure, however fleshy, could, since other figures had no doubles, and indeed as no idea ever could, since ideas have no pores: this is the supreme level of existence, mocking every other. The object of the dispute between Homer and Plato is the body of Helen. Both men won. When we see the goddess reproduced thousands upon thousands of times, the Platonic curse of the copy triumphs. But the goddess is a star and occupies a unique, unassailable place, in the sky.