According to Stesichorus and Euripides, Helen was a phantom. According to Homer, Helen was the phantom, eídōlon. The Homeric vision is by far the more thorny and frightening. Dealing with a phantom while knowing that there is a reality to counter it doesn’t involve the same kind of tension as dealing with a phantom and knowing that it is also a reality. Helen is as gold to other merchandise: gold too is merchandise, but of such a kind that it can represent all the others. The phantom, or image, is precisely that act of representation. While Troy burned, Menelaus found himself confronted by Helen’s bared breast. He could have smothered it in blood, repeated what he had just done to Deiphobus. But how can one kill gold? Helen would have gone on breathing in some niche of her murderer’s mind, and likewise in the minds of all the other warriors who had wanted to respond to the lure of her voice when they were shut up in the horse’s belly. Helen was a reflection on water. How can you kill a reflection without killing the water? And how can you kill water? Menelaus didn’t actually think any of this as he let his sword drop, but it was this that made him drop it.
Meanwhile, he was thinking of something completely different. He was thinking of Agamemnon. He was afraid his brother would take him for a coward or a weakling once again. So he decided to get smart, the way the others had. He gripped Helen’s wrist and dragged her along as though to the slaughter. And at last Agamemnon turned up. Menelaus had to pretend to have his brother convince him not to kill Helen. Agamemnon unwittingly played the part he was supposed to. Words that had once been Priam’s sprang to his lips: “Helen isn’t the cause of this.” Menelaus wasted no time agreeing. Now there was one last problem: the army of warriors. Once again, Menelaus decided he would have to present himself in the role of the avenging husband. He approached the Achaean camp holding Helen tightly by the wrist, his face grim. The crowd parted before them. They all had stones in their hands. They had chosen them carefully to stone Helen. Menelaus pressed on, dragging his faithless wife, and, as the warriors formed a semicircle around them, he heard the dull thud of stones falling thick and fast to the ground, already forgotten.
In the deep calm of the opium, Menelaus managed to recall, without so much as a quiver of resentment, how Helen had tried to the very last to bring ruin upon the Greeks. It was thanks to her that Anticlus had been strangled. But if Odysseus hadn’t strangled him, if one of the heroes had answered her alluring voice, they might all have been burned alive in the belly of the horse. Or the Trojans would have thought up some other horrible death for them. Yet Menelaus recounted the episode, in front of Helen and their guests, as though it were an image of glory, to be savored with pleasure.
Twenty years later, Menelaus had understood a thing or two about the woman beside him. He no longer thought of punishing her, as he had for so many years and so obsessively fantasized. He was happy to have understood of her what amounted to no more than the hem of her tunic. And this, among other things, was what he had understood: that for Greeks and Trojans alike Helen had posed the danger of the phantom, the image. Living with the phantom is ruinous, but neither of the two sides had wanted to live without. It was over the phantom they had fought. And now the phantom went on threatening and enchanting life in Greece.
The night Troy was put to the torch, Helen had pushed the danger for both Greeks and Trojans to the limit, for this was of her essence. She insinuated her voice into the seething dark of the horse, shaking the soul of the Achaean warriors. Then, just a few moments later, while dancing on the Acropolis with the other Trojan women, she waved the torch that was to signal to the other Achaeans waiting on their ships that it was time to attack. Two incompatible actions, one right after the other. Helen performed them both with the same serenity. Those two actions were Helen. Never as on that night did Helen reveal herself so completely, a great, intoxicating moon radiating its light impartially on all.
What is the evil of exile? “One and terrible,” claims Polynices: “not having freedom of speech [parrēsía].” And his mother, Iocasta, adds: “Not to say what one thinks is the way of the servant.” Frankness, that first feature of the aristocratic ethic, becomes secularized with democracy into freedom of speech. Odysseus steered clear of both. He renounced the frankness of the warrior when he pretended to be crazy so as not to sail for Troy; he renounced freedom of speech when he played the part of the wandering beggar who could be told to shut up and sent packing by the merest servant.
Odysseus was the first to have mediation triumph over the immediate, postponement over presence, the twisted mind over straightforwardness. All the character traits that would be assigned over the centuries to the merchant, the foreigner, the Jew, the traveling player were coined by Odysseus in himself. He looked ahead to a human condition in which neither aristocratic frankness nor democratic freedom of speech would be enough. Many centuries later, that condition seems normal, but in Odysseus’s time it was a foresight granted only to one who had traveled a great deal between earth and heaven. So, whereas Achilles and Agamemnon stand out in our memories as leftovers of another creation, consumed by catastrophe, Odysseus is still familiar to us, a sort of invisible companion. The presence he renounced in its immediacy is redeemed in the stream of memory and history. Achilles has to be evoked; Odysseus is already at our side, wherever we are, whatever the circumstances.
Throughout Odysseus’s life, and above all during the long years of the voyage back from Troy, there was a constant whispered exchange between himself and Athena. Nothing happened to the hero without that whisper being part of it. Only once did it peter out altogether. Then Odysseus had to find his way back to another female voice, even more remote, a voice beyond which all voices fall silent. He was clutching the raft he’d built with his own hands on Calypso’s island. Huge waves battered the mast. Naked, clinging to a few planks of wood, he might have been the first or last man on the waters of the flood. He couldn’t hear Athena’s voice. Then, looking up amid the whirling foam, he saw a white sea gull on the top of the mast, and in its beak it held a purple ribbon.
That ribbon, incongruous in the storm, reminded him of something. It was absurd trying to remember what, when at any moment a wave might submerge his raft forever. But Odysseus was determined he would remember. One day, in Samothrace, when he had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri, some nameless person had come up to him and tied a purple sash around his waist, the kr
demnon. And that sash now seemed to be fluttering in the sea gull’s beak. Odysseus realized that only a veil lay between him and death, and that veil was initiation. When everything is reduced to its most basic and is about to be swallowed up, there is still a ribbon fluttering in the dark.
Instead of protecting himself from the waves, Odysseus exposed himself by reaching out an arm to take the purple ribbon from the sea gull’s beak. Then he tied it around his waist. He repeated the ritual of Samothrace, but this time the nameless person’s hands were his own. For years that purple ribbon that saved Odysseus from shipwreck had been tied around the hair of Leucothea, the White Goddess. And before becoming the goddess who rises from the watery depths to rescue sailors, Leucothea had been a poor mad woman who drowned herself, throwing herself into the sea from a cliff, her infant child in her arms. At the time her name was Ino; she was one of the four daughters of Cadmus and wife of King Athamas. During her mother Harmony’s lifetime, and perhaps partly because Harmony “knew of many crimes committed in the past by barbarians and Greeks,” the most heterogeneous and remote elements had agreed to submit to the same yoke. Afterward, during the lifetime of her daughters, every unity was torn apart and dismembered, as if the gods had wanted to have everybody appreciate, and fast, that the harmonious yoke that binds disparate elements is the most precarious form of all.