Fall Asleep to the ENTIRE Story of Helen of Troy (Greek Mythology for Sleep)

Full transcript

Good evening and welcome back. The hour has grown still and the room around you has begun the slow practice of letting go of the day. The lamps are low, the corners have softened. Whatever the morning brought, whatever the afternoon asked, whatever the evening still holds in its small busy hands, you may begin, now little by little, to set it down. There is no urgency here. The story we are about to enter is older than urgency. It has waited a long time already. It will wait, patient as a loom standing quiet in a darkened hall, for as much of your attention as you can give before sleep takes you.

Let your shoulders settle. Let your jaw rest. Let your hands lie wherever they have come to rest, open or folded, whichever feels more natural to the body that has carried you this far. There is no pose to maintain tonight, there is no question to answer before the morning. The day with all its rough edges may now begin its slow folding away into memory, the night, kind and old, may begin to gather you up. Tonight we enter the story of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world, the daughter of a god and a mortal queen, the wife of a Spartan king, the face that the old singers said had launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of a great city.

Hers is a strange and sorrowful tale, a tale of beauty so great that it became a kind of fate. Of a woman who was at once the cause of a famous war and, in some tellings, never even present at it. We will follow her from a hidden egg in a Spartan palace, through a marriage and a leaving and a long siege, to a quiet homecoming and an old age beside the very husband she had left. And we will hold at the end the gentlest and strangest version of all, in which the whole great war was fought over an image, and the real Helen waited out the years in peace by a far river. We will move through these images slowly. We will not press them.

We will let them rise and fade like figures painted faintly on the wall of an old temple and the listener may drift into sleep at any point along the way without missing what matters. Let cozy, settle in and let us begin. You may close your eyes if your eyes wish to close. The story will keep its shape without you watching it. The Greeks who first told it would have understood. They told it for many centuries, in the great horns and at the small fires, and they argued over it, and they retold it in different ways, and they could never quite agree what Helen had been. Whether a guilty woman or an innocent one, a willing one or a stolen one, a real woman or a kind of dream the whole world had agreed to chase, the teller continued, the listener slept or did not sleep as the listener wished. The story carried on regardless, the way beauty itself carries on, indifferent to whether anyone is awake to look at it.

In the beginning of this telling, we must step back to the Kingdom of Sparta, in the southern part of Greece, in the time before the Great War, to the household of a king named Tindarius and his wife the Queen Leader. And here, at the very root of Helen's story, we meet one of the strangest of all the old tales of the loves of Zeus. For Zeus, the king of the gods, looked down upon Leader and desired her, and he came to her, the old story says, in the form of a swan, a great white bird gliding down out of the sky onto the still water of a Spartan River. We will pass the manner of it gently, the way the sleep story passes all such things. We We will only say that from that union and from Leida's own marriage to her mortal husband in the same season came a most unusual birth.

For Leida, the story says, did not bear ordinary children. She brought forth eggs as a bird might, and from those eggs came four children mingled of the divine and the mortal. From them came Helen, the daughter of Zeus, the most beautiful of all, and her sister Clitam Nestra, who would marry Agamemnon and play her own dark part in the story of the war's end, and the two brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux, the horsemen and the boxer who loved their sister Helen fiercely, and who would one day be set among the stars as the constellation of the twins, the patrons of sailors, the bright pair that shines over the sea in winter. So Helen was born into a household half-divine, the daughter of the king of the gods, sister to a queen and to two heroes who would become stars. And from From her earliest childhood, there was something about her that drew every eye.

A beauty that was not quite like the beauty of other children. A beauty that already, while she was still a girl, began to bring trouble to the house. For her beauty was famous before she was even grown. While she was still a young girl in Sparta, the story says, the hero Theseus of Athens, already an old man by then, heard of her beauty and carried her away, meaning to make her his wife when she should come of age. But her brothers Castor and Pollux came after her, swift and determined, and they took her back and brought her safely home before any harm was done, and Helen returned to Sparta, still a girl.

We will pass this early trouble gently. It matters chiefly because it was the first sign of the pattern that would shape her whole life, that her beauty made her a thing that men wished to seize and to own, a prize to be carried off, almost before she was old enough to have any say in the matter at all. She did not ask to be the most beautiful woman in the world. It was given to her, the way the colour of the eyes is given without choice, and it became the great fact of her life, the thing that everything else would turn around, the gift that was also in its way a long captivity. There is more to that early abduction than the simple carrying off, and it is worth a moment, for it shows how the threads of the old stories cross and bind.

When Theseus took the young Helen, he left her in the care of his own mother, an old woman named Aethra to be guarded until Helen was grown. And when the brothers Castor and Pollux came and took their sister back, they took Aethra too and made the old woman Helen's servant and Aethra remained with Helen for many years, even following her long afterward all the way to Troy, so that the mother of the great Athenian hero ended her days as the attendant of the woman over whom the world went to war.

The old singers loved such bindings. The way one story reaches into another across the generations, the way the consequences of a single deed travel far down the years and turn up in places no one could have foreseen. And the brothers themselves, Caster and Pollux, who had ridden so swiftly to rescue their sister, had their own story and their own ending, and it is a tender one. They were the closest of brothers, almost a single soul in two bodies, and they did everything together. But one of them, Pollux, was the son of Zeus and so immortal, while the other, Castor, was the son of their mortal father and so was doomed to die. And when at last Castor was killed in a quarrel, Pollux was so stricken with grief at the parting that he begged his father, Zeus to let him die too, rather than live on forever without his brother.

Zeus moved by such love. Granted them a gentle compromise, the two brothers would share Pollux's immortality between them, dwelling one day among the gods and the next among the dead, forever together never parted, passing back and forth across the threshold of death side by side. And in the end Zeus set them both in the sky as the constellation of the twins, the bright pair that rises over the winter sea, the patrons and protectors of sailors who prey to them in storms. So, Helen's brothers, who had saved her as a girl, became two stars, watching over the very sea that her own story would one day fill with a thousand ships.

But Helen, on the walls of Troy in the years to come, would look for them in vain among the Greek army, not knowing that they were already gone from the earth, already shining far away over the water. When Helen came of age and the time came for her to marry, the trouble her beauty caused grew greater still. For now every king and prince and hero in all of Greece desired her, and they came to Sparta as suitors, a great crowd of them, the finest and most powerful men of the age, each bringing rich gifts, each hoping to win her hand.

There were so many of them, and they were so powerful, and they wanted her so badly that her mortal father Tindarius grew afraid. For he saw that whichever suitor he chose, all the others, the great and warlike men he had passed over, would be angry, and might make war upon the Lucky Bridegroom or upon Sparta itself. The very abundance of her suitors was a danger. To give her to one was to insult all the rest. It was Odysseus, the cleverest of the suitors, the king of Ithidka, who found the way out, though he himself, seeing how the matter stood, had already quietly given up his own hope of winning Helen and set his heart on her cousin Penelope instead.

Odysseus proposed a solution to Tindarius. the choice was made, let every suitor swear a great oath, that whichever one of them was chosen all the others would respect the choice, and more than that would come to the chosen husband's aid if anyone ever tried to take Helen away from him. Let them all bind themselves, in advance, to defend the marriage whoever the bridegroom turned out to be. The suitors, eager and perhaps not seeing how far the oath might one day reach, all swore it, standing together over the cut pieces of a sacrificed horse in the old and most binding manner of oaths, each calling the gods to witness that he would defend the husband of Helen against any man who wronged him.

They were the greatest men of the age who stood there and swore, kings of rich cities and lords of many ships, warriors whose names would later fill the songs of the war. And Odysseus, who had devised the oath, took for his own reward not Helen, whom he had seen he could not win against so many greater men but the hand of her cousin Penelope, a wise and faithful woman who would prove, in the long years of his own later wandering, be worth more to him than all the beauty of Sparta. So the cleverest of the suitors went home content with the quieter prize, having turned the whole dangerous crowd of rivals into a sworn brotherhood with a single careful idea.

He did not know, as none of them knew, that he had just bound himself and all the rest to a war that would take ten years of his life and very nearly cost him his way home. This was the famous Oath of Tindarius, and it is one of the quiet hinges of the whole story, for it meant that the marriage of Helen was no longer the concern of one household alone. powerful men in Greece had bound themselves by a sacred oath to defend it, and so years later, when Helen was carried away to Troy, that old oath could be invoked, and the kings of Greece, who had sworn it as young men hoping to win her, were called upon to make good their word.

And the whole host of Greece was gathered for the war because of a promise made long before. by men who never imagined what it would one day cost them. With the oath sworn and the danger of the suit his anger removed, the choice was made and Helen was given in marriage to Menelaus, the king of Sparta, the brother of the powerful Agamemden, king of Mycenae, who had married Helen's sister, Clytemnestra. So the two sisters married the two brothers, and Helen became Queen of Sparta and she bore Menelaus her daughter Hermione and for a time. The story implies there was peace, an ordinary royal marriage, a household, a child, the years going by in the rich palace beneath the Spartan hills.

We are given few details of those quiet years, for the songs do not dwell on quiet years. But we may imagine them, the running of a great house, the storerooms and the looms, the tending of the little daughter Hermione, the slow round of the seasons in a prosperous southern kingdom, the festivals and the harvests, the ordinary contentment of a queen in her own hall, going about the long unremarkable work of a settled life. These were the years that might have been her whole story. Had no goddess and no foolish prince come between her and them, Helen was a wife and a mother and a queen.

Had the story ended there, it would have been a quiet one, and no songs would have been sung of her. But the gods had other designs, and they had laid the seeds of them far away at a wedding Helen never attended. For we must turn now to a wedding among the gods, the wedding of the sea-goddest Thetis to a mortal king named Pelias, the same wedding that would, in another story, produce the great Achilles, all the gods were invited to that wedding, all but one. The goddess of discord Eris was not invited, for no one wishes discord at a wedding. But she came anyway, unseen, and she threw down among the guests a single golden apple, inscribed with three words for the fairest. And three goddesses reached for it and claimed it as their own, Hera, the Queen of Heaven, Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.

They fell to Quarreling over which of them was the fairest and so deserved the apple, and the quarrel grew so bitter that not even Zeus would judge it. But to choose among his wife, his daughter and the goddess of love was to make two terrible enemies whichever way he chose. So Zeus sent the three goddesses down to earth to be judged by a mortal man, a young prince of Troy named Paris, who was at that time living as a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Ida above the city, for reasons that belonged to his own story.

And his own story is worth the telling, for it had a dark beginning. Before Paris was born, his mother, Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, dreamed that she gave birth not to a child but to a burning torch, a firebrand that set the whole city of Troy ablaze. The seers asked to read the dream gave a grim answer, the child she carried would one day bring about the burning of Troy, and to save the city he must not be allowed to live. And so when Paris was born, he was carried out to the wild slopes of Mount Ida and left there to die, exposed upon the mountain as the old world sometimes dealt with children that prophecy had marked. But the infant did not die. He was found and suckled, the old story says, by a bear. And then taken in and raised by a kindly shepherd. Then he grew up on the mountain as a herdsman, strong and beautiful, knowing nothing of his royal birth, tending his flocks and loving the gentle mountain nymph named Ewe None, who would later, when he abandoned her, grieve for him to the end. He was so fair and so fitted to judge a contest of beauty that the gods chose him for the judgment of the apple. And so the child who had been cast out to save the city was brought, by the very contest, to the choice that would doom it after all, the firebrand the queen had dreamed of was about to be lit.

The three great goddesses came down to the hillside where the young man kept his flocks and they asked him to judge which of them was the fairest and to award the golden apple to her. And because they were goddesses and because they wanted the prize, each of them offered Paris a bribe to win his choice. Hera offered him power, rule over the greatest kingdoms of the earth. Athena offered him wisdom and skill and victory in every battle he should ever fight. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, offered him the thing that would undo the world.

She offered him the most beautiful woman who lived for his own wife. Paris, young and not wise, chose Aphrodite's gift. He awarded her the golden apple and in return she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. But the most beautiful woman in the world was Helen. And Helen was already married, already the queen of Sparta, already the wife of Menelaus. None of that mattered to Aphrodite, nor when the time came to Paris. The judgment on the hillside had been made, and from it everything else would follow.

journey of Paris to Sparta, the carrying away of Helen, the great war, the fall of Troy. A quarrel over an apple at a wedding Helen never attended had sealed the fate of her life. This is one of the things the Greeks found so strange and so sorrowful in her story that the great fact of her existence, the thing that would define her forever, was decided by others, by a goddess and a foolish prince on a far hillside, before she had any knowledge of it at all. In time, the prince Paris came to Sparta, received now as a royal guest, no no longer a shepherd, but a son of King Priam of Troy.

Menelaus welcomed him into his house with all the honour due to a guest, the sacred hospitality that the old world held to be among the most binding of all obligations, the trust between host and guest that the gods themselves protected. And then Menelaus, called away to a funeral on the island of Crete, left his guest in his house in the care of his wife, trusting to the sacred bond of hospitality. And while he was gone, Paris and Helen left together, taking ship for Troy, carrying away with them much of the treasure of the Spartan house.

The voyage itself was not a simple one and the old singers told it in different ways. Some said the goddess Hera, still angry at Paris for the judgement on the hillside, sent a storm that drove their ship far off course, down to the coasts of Egypt and Phoenicia, so that it was a long while before they came at last to Troy. had come to Troy at last they did, and there Helen was received into the high city, into the household of King Priam, as the wife now of his son Paris. And the reception was a mixed and uneasy one from the very start. The old king and many of the royal house received her with courtesy, dazzled perhaps, as everyone was dazzled by her beauty.

But there were others in Troy who looked at the foreign queen with foreboding from the first day, who felt the shadow she had brought with her, who guessed that no good could come of receiving the stolen wife of a powerful Greek king into their walls. They were right to fear. Behind Helen, across the sea she had just crossed, the Oath of Tindarius was already being invoked and the ships were already being gathered and the long shadow of the war was already beginning to fall across the bright towers of the city that had taken her in. Here we come to the deepest question of Helen's whole story. The question the Greeks argued over for a thousand years and never settled and we will hold it gently tonight rather than try to answer it, for it has no answer.

Did Helen go willingly or was she taken? Was she a guilty wife who abandoned her husband and her child for a handsome stranger or was she the helpless victim of Aphrodite, compelled by the goddess of love against her own will, a woman who could no more resist the power laid upon her than a leaf can resist the wind. The old singers told it both ways, and sometimes both ways at once. In some telling she is carried off against her will, weeping, looking back at the receding shore of Greece. In others she goes of her own desire, dazzled by Paris, choosing him. And in the deepest tellings the two are not even separate, for what is the will of a mortal woman against the will of the goddess of love herself, and where does the goddess end and the woman begin? The Greeks left it unresolved, because they They understood that the heart in the grip of a great passion cannot always say whether it is choosing or being chosen.

We will leave it unresolved too. We will only mark that Helen sailed to Troy and that whether she went as a willing wife or a stolen prize, she would spend the next ten years and more paying for that sailing. When Menelaus returned from Crete and found his guest gone and his wife gone with him, his anger was terrible and it was a righteous anger, for the sacred bond of hospitality had been broken in the worst way. He went to his brother Agamemnon, the High King, and together they invoked the old oath of Tindarius.

They sent messengers across all of Greece to every king and prince who had sworn, years before, to defend the marriage of Helen. And the oath held. The kings came, however reluctantly, for an oath sworn before the gods could not be set aside. They gathered their men and their ships at the harbour of Aulis, a great host out of every corner of Greece, more than a thousand ships, the largest fleet the world had ever seen. The gathering of that host was itself a long labour and not every man came willingly.

Odysseus, who had a wise wife and a newborn son and a small kingdom he loved, did not wished to leave them for a war over another man's wife. And when the messengers came to call him to his oath, he feigned madness, ploughing the seashore with an ox and an arse, yoked together and sowing the furrows with salt, hoping to be judged unfit to sail. But one of the messengers, suspecting the trick, snatched up Odysseus' infant son and laid him in the path of the plough, and Odysseus turned the blade aside to spare the child, and so revealed that he was sane after all, and was bound to his oath and came to the war.

There was the young Achilles too, the greatest warrior of them all, whose mother had hidden him to keep him from the fighting and the early death she foresaw for him there, and who had to be found and drawn out before the host could sail, for it was prophesied that Troy would never fall without him. So the gathering was slow and reluctant, and full of men who would rather have stayed home, and yet the oath and the prophecies drew them all, one by one, to the harbour at Aulis. And there the fleet lay becalmed for a long while, the winds refusing to blow, the ship's idle, the host growing restless on the shore, until the proper rights had been performed to win the favour of the goddess who held back the wind. We will pass the cost of those rites gently, for it was a bitter one, and it belongs to the darker tale of the House of Agamemnon and to other knights. We will only say that at last the winds were granted, and when at last the winds were fair, the whole vast fleet put out together across the sea, bound for the coast of Asia, bound for the high walled city of Troy, to take back by war the woman who had been carried away, and to punish the city that had received her. There is one thing more that should be told before the war begins, for it shows that the whole catastrophe might still have been avoided even then. Before the fighting started, when the Greek host had reached the shore below Troy they did not at once attack. First they sent an embassy into the city, a peaceful one. Menelaus himself, the wronged husband, went and with him Odysseus, the man of persuasive words, and they stood before the assembly of the Trojans and asked, reasonably and without threat for the simple return of Helen and of the treasure that had been taken with her.

Had the Trojans given her back then, the war need never have been fought, the city need never have fallen, the thousands who died on that plane might have lived out their lives. And there were Trojans, wise ones, the elders, who counseled exactly that, who said plainly that Helen should be returned and the quarrel ended. But Paris would not give her up, and those who profited from the stolen treasure spoke against returning it, and in the end the embassy was refused, and Menelaus and Odysseus were sent away empty-handed, and one hot-headed faction in the city even spoke of killing the envoys against all the laws of heralds until cooler voices prevented it.

So the last chance for peace was let go, and the war came, not because it had to, but because a foolish prince would not let go of the woman a goddess had promised him, and a proud city would not overrule its prince. The Greeks remembered this. They knew that the long slaughter had been at the very end a choice, and a choice that need not have been made. The war that followed lasted ten long years, and we will not tell it as a tale of battle, for the sleep story turns its eyes from the edge of the sword, and besides, the war itself belongs to other knights and other heroes, to Achilles and his wrath, to Hector the defender of the city, to the long grinding siege upon the plain. Tonight we are following Helen, and so we will go inside the walls of Troy where she lived through all those years and we will see the war as she saw it, from above, from a distance, from the high ramparts of the city that was being destroyed because of her. There is a scene from the great poem of the war that shows us Helen and Troy more truly than any other, and it is a quiet one, a scene of an old man and a beautiful woman standing together on a high wall looking out over a battlefield.

In the early days of the tenth year the old King Priam, the father of Paris, the ruler of Troy, sat upon the wall of the city with the eldest counsellors of Troy beside him, and Helen came up to join them. And when the old men of Troy saw her coming, they murmured to one another, quietly, that it was no wonder, no cause for blame, that the Trojans and the Greeks had suffered so long for such a woman, for her beauty was terrible, like the beauty of the deathless goddesses. And yet they said, for all her beauty, let her go back in the ships, and not be left here to be a sorrow to them and to their children after them. In that But one murmured exchange the old poet caught the whole impossible truth of Helen, that her beauty was so great that men could not blame those who fought for it, and yet so costly that they wished, with all their hearts, that she had never come among them.

And then the old king Priam called Helen to sit beside him, and he spoke to her with a gentleness that is one of the most moving things in the whole story. He did not blame her. He told her that he held her not at fault, that he held the gods at fault, the gods who had brought this war upon them. And he asked her, since she could see the Greek army spread out on the plain below, to name for him the great Greek leaders, for she knew them, having lived among them once as a queen of Greece. And so Helen stood on the wall beside the old king who did not blame her, and she looked down upon the army of her own people, the people she had left, and she named them for Priam one by one.

There is Agamemnon, she said, the great king, the brother of the husband I left. There is Odysseus, the man of many councils. There is the great Ajax, the bulwark of the Greeks. And as she named them, she wept. For they were the men of her own homeland, come across the sea to bring her back. And she spoke of her old home, and of her husband, and of the daughter she had left behind, and of her brothers, whom she looked for in vain among the army, not knowing that Castor and Pollux were already dead far away in Greece, and lay beneath the earth of their own country.

This is the Helen the old poet wanted us to see, not a wicked woman gloating over the war she had caused, but a sorrowful one, full of self-reproach, who called herself hard names, who wished she had died before she ever followed Paris to Troy, who grieved for the home and the husband and the child she had left, who stood among the people of Troy is a kind of beautiful curse that everyone was too courteous to name aloud. She was honored in Troy and she was hated in Troy and she knew it and she lived for ten years inside a city that was being slowly destroyed because of her, knowing that every man who died on that plane on either side was dying for The Greeks understood that this was its own kind of punishment, deeper than any the war could inflict from outside to live day after day, as the cause of a suffering you can see all around you and cannot stop.

There came a day, early in that last year, when it seemed the whole war might be settled. Helen's fate decided by a single combat between the two men who claimed her. For it was agreed between the armies that Paris, who had taken Helen and Menelaus from whom she had been taken, should fight alone, man to man, in the space between the two hosts, and that whoever won should keep Helen and all her treasure, and the long war should end and both peoples should swear peace and part. The armies sat down on either side to watch, glad of the hope that the killing might be over. And the two men fought, there in the dusty space between the silent armies, while Helen watched from the wall above. Menelaus, the stronger and the angrier, soon had the better of it. He broke his sword on Paris's helmet, then seized Paris by the crest of that helmet and began to drag him bodily toward the Greek lines. And Paris was choking, half throttled by his own chin strap on the very edge of death and defeat. And in that instant the goddess Aphrodite, who would not let her favourite die.

Snapped the strap so that the empty helmet came away in Menelaus' hand and wrapped Paris in a thick mist, and snatched him up out of the battle altogether and set him down, unhurt, safe in his own perfumed chamber within the walls. stalked up and down the field, looking for the man who had vanished from under his hands, and no one on either side could tell him where Paris had gone, for none of them would have hidden him. So the duel that should have ended the war ended instead in a disappearance, and the fighting, after a broken truce, began again and dragged on for the rest of that terrible year. It was as though the gods themselves would not allow the war to end so cleanly, would not let the quarrel over Helen be settled by anything so simple as one fair fight. Her life inside the walls was a lonely one. Paris, the man she had followed across the sea, proved to be no great hero, but a soft and somewhat cowardly man, more skilled with the bow from a safe distance than with the spear in the press of battle. And Helen came, in the great poem, to despise him, even as she remained bound to him." There is a scene where Paris flees from the battlefield after challenging Menelaus to single combat, saved only by the goddess Aphrodite, who snatches him away in a cloud when he is about to be killed, and sets him down safely in his own chamber, and then comes to Helen and bids her go to him. And Helen, in that scene, turns on the goddess with a weary bitterness, almost defiance. Telling Aphrodite to go and sit with Paris herself if she loves him so much, for Helen is a shame too. It is a remarkable moment, a mortal woman speaking back to the goddess of love, worn down by the passion that had been laid upon her, longing only for it to end.

But the goddess answers with a flash of anger and a threat and Helen, afraid, obeys and goes to Paris as she is bid. Even her defiance is not allowed to last. She is held to the end in the grip of the power that brought her to Troy. She found more kindness among the Trojans from the great Hector, the noble prince, the true defender of the city, the brother of the man she had followed. Hector never reproached her, though the war was destroying his city and would in the end destroy him and his wife and his infant son.

He treated her with courtesy and with gentleness. And Helen knew the worth of it, and when Hector at last fell, killed by Achilles before the walls, Helen mourned him as truly as any in Troy. And in the great poem it is Helen who speaks the last of the laments over Hector's body, Faying that of all the household of Troy he alone had always been gentle to her, had always defended her with kind words when others reproached her, and that now he was gone she had no friend left in all the wide city, and everyone shuddered at her.

It is one of the loneliest speeches in the old poetry, the most beautiful woman in the world, standing in a doomed city among people who blamed her, weeping over the one man who had been kind to her and knowing that with his death her last shelter was gone. She lived those years among the women of Troy, and the old poets gave us glimpses of them too, for the war fell hardest in the end upon the women. There was Hecuba, the old Queen, the mother of Hector and Paris and so many sons who would lose nearly all of them before the end. There was Andromache, Hector's gentle wife, who had begged him not to go out to his death, and who would be left a widow with a small son in a falling city.

There was Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, who had been given the gift of true prophecy and the curse that no one would ever believe her, and who foresaw clearly and helplessly every disaster that was coming to Troy, and cried out the warnings that no one heeded. These were the women among whom Helen lived, the women whose city and husbands and sons were being destroyed for her sake, and yet the old poets show them for the most part treating her with a strange courtesy, even a kind of tenderness.

As though they understood, as Priam had said, that the fault lay with the gods, and not with the beautiful frightened woman in their midst, Helen wove and spun and kept the customs of the women's rooms and waited year after year in a household that was not hers, in a city that was not hers, among a war that was entirely about her and entirely beyond her power to end. We will pass over the long years of the war and the deaths of its heroes gently, for they belong to other tellings and to other nights.

We will only say that the war ground on, that Hector fell, and that Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks, fell too, struck at last by an arrow loosed by Paris and guided by the God Apollo. And Paris himself did not live to see the end and his death holds one of the saddest small stories of the whole war. He was struck by a poisoned arrow and the wound would not heal and he was dying of it. Now there was one person in all the world who could have healed him. Oh Inoni, the gentle mountain nymph who had loved him in his shepherd days on Mount Ida, before ever he sailed to Sparta, the wife of his youth whom he had abandoned for Helen.

Oinoni had the gift of healing herbs and she had told him long ago when he left her that if he were ever mortally wounded he should come to her and she alone could save him. After now dying, Paris was carried up the mountain to her to beg for the healing, and Unonie, remembering how he had cast her aside for another woman, refused him in her old grief and anger and sent him away to die. But when he had gone, her love overcame her bitterness and she relented and gathered her herbs and hurried after him down the mountain. To save him after all, she came too late.

He was already dead. And Oinoni, in her grief at the death of the man she had both refused and loved, took her own life beside his body. We will pass this sorrow gently. It is one of the quiet tragedies that gather at the edges of the Great One, the faithful first love forgotten. The healing offered too late. Two more lives folded into the long cost of the war. After Paris fell, Helen, the cause of it all, was given in some tellings to another of Priam's sons, a prince named Diphobus, married again within the doomed city, passed from one Trojan prince to another, a prize even now, even in the last days, even when the city that held her was nearly at its end. And the end, when it came, came not by force, but by a the most famous trick in all the old stories.

The Greeks, unable to take the high walls of Troy by ten years of fighting, built a great hollow horse of wood and hid their best warriors inside it, and left it standing before the city as though it were an offering to the gods, and sailed away, pretending to give up the war at last and go home. And the Trojans, deceived and overjoyed that the long siege seemed ended, dragged the great horse inside their walls in triumph, not knowing what it carried in its dark belly. There were warnings as there always are, and as they always are they went unheeded. The priest Lalkoun cried out that he feared the Greeks even when they brought gifts, and warned that the horse should not be trusted and hurled his spear against its wooden flank so that the weapons within rang faintly, but he was not believed and a terrible portent soon silenced him. And Cassandra, the prophetess who was never believed, cried out that the horse held the city's doom, that ruin was hidden in its belly, that they were dragging their own destruction in through their own gates with their own hands, but she was Cassandra, cursed always to be right and never to be heeded. And the people laughed at her or pitied her and went on hauling the great horse up through the streets, garlanding it, rejoicing, while the woman who saw the truth wept and could not stop them. So the city carried its end inside its walls, singing on the very night before it fell.

There is a strange small tale told of Helen on that last night, and it is one of the eeriest in her whole story. As the great horse stood within the walls in the darkness, with the The Greek warriors, hidden silent inside it. Helen, the story says, came out and walked around the horse. And she called out softly in the voices of the wives of the Greek warriors hidden inside, imitating each woman's voice perfectly, calling each hidden man by name in the tones of the wife he had left behind across the sea.

Whether she did it to test the horse, or to betray the men inside to the Trojans, or under some compulsion, the old tellers were not sure. And it adds to the strangeness of her. The hidden warriors, hearing the voices of their own wives calling to them in the dark, were almost undone by longing, and one of them nearly answered aloud and would have given them all away, had not Odysseus ever watchful clapped his hand over the man's mouth and held him silent until the danger passed. It is a haunting image, the most beautiful woman in the world walking in the dark around a wooden horse, speaking with the borrowed voices of distant wives and the hidden men inside aching to answer.

In the deep of that night the warriors came out of the horse and opened the gates of Troy to the army that had returned under cover of darkness and the city that had held out for ten years fell in a single night. We will pass over the fall of Troy gently, for it It was terrible, one of the great sorrows of the old world, a proud city given over to fire and ruin. We will follow only Helen through it. For in the chaos of the city's fall Menelaus, her first husband, the king she had left ten years before, came searching for her through the burning streets, sword in hand, having sworn that when he found her he would kill her, would at last avenge the wound she had dealt him and the long war her leaving had caused.

It is told that Helen, in that last terrible night, did a thing that has been read both as betrayal and as the act of a woman choosing at last which side she belonged to. She led Menelaus and Odysseus to the chamber where Diphobus, her latest Trojan husband, lay, and so delivered him to their swords, and she took the weapons from the house so that he could not defend himself, helping the Greeks to the man she had been given to against her will. Whether this was treachery or a kind of homecoming, an act of cruelty or an act of return to her own people. The old singers, as ever with Helen, did not finally say.

And then, with Diphabas dead, Menelaus came at last for Helen herself. And he found her. The old story says he came upon Helen in the falling city, and he raised his sword to kill her. His anger of ten years gathered behind the blow. And then he looked at her. He looked at her face, the face he had not seen in ten years, the most beautiful face in the world, the face that had launched the thousand ships. And the sword fell from his hand. He could not do it, whether it was love returning or simple wonder at her beauty or the working of Aphrodite once again. The old singers tell it the same way. That the husband who had crossed the sea with a thousand ships to kill, his faithless wife, who had every right and every reason and every intention to strike, took one look at her and let the sword drop, and took her back instead, and led her down out of the burning city to his ship, to carry her home to Sparta after all the long years and all the dead. The homecoming was not quick. Menelaus and Helen, like many of the Greeks returning from Troy, were driven far off course by storms and by the anger of the gods at the cruelty of the city's sack, and they wandered for years, blown as far as Egypt, before at last the winds and the gods allowed them home.

There is a tale of that long wandering that is worth the telling, for it is one of the gentlest in the whole story, and it shows Menelaus at the mercy of the sea, as Helen had so long been at the mercy of fate. Be calmed and stranded on an island off the coast of Egypt, his provisions failing, his men growing desperate. Menelaus learned that the only one who could tell him how to win his way home was an old god of the sea named Proteus, the herdsman of the seals, who rose each day from the water to sleep among his herd on the shore at noon.

But Proteus would not answer questions willingly, and he could change his shape at will to escape any who tried to hold him. So Menelius, advised by the god's own daughter, hid himself among the seals on the beach, wrapped in a sealskin, and waited through the long bright noon until the old sea god came up and lay down to sleep among his creatures. And then Menelius seized him and held on. Proteus, waking, changed himself into a lion and Menelius held on. He became a serpent and a leopard and a great boar and Menelius held on.

He became running water and then a tall flowering tree and still Menelius held on, through every shape, refusing to let go until at last the old god, finding he could not slip free, returned to his own form and answered. And Proteus told Menelaus what rites he had failed to perform and must perform and how he should win his way home and Menelaus did as he was told and the way home opened at last. The old The old singers loved this story for the same reason they loved Medea singing the dragon to sleep.

It taught that the way past a slippery and shifting difficulty is not force alone, but holding on patiently through every form the difficulty takes until it tires of changing and tells you what you need to know. At home they came, in the end, the king and the queen, back to the rich palace beneath the Spartan hills where the story had begun, back to the very household Helen had left so long before. And there the old tellings say, they lived out the rest of their days together, reconciled.

The long, terrible interruption of the war folded away behind them, as though the ten years and the thousand ships and the fallen city had been a long, dark dream from which they had both at last awakened in the bed where they had begun. There is a quiet and beautiful glimpse of Helen in this later piece, in the great poem of the wanderings of Odysseus. So when the young Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, came to Sparta seeking news of his lost father, he came to the palace of Menelaus and Helene, and was received as a guest, and there he saw Helene. No longer the prize of a war, but the gracious mistress of a great house, mature and serene, presiding over the hall, recognising the young stranger at once as the son of Odysseus by his likeness to his father.

And as the evening drew on, Helen and Menelaus told stories of the war to their young guest, stories of his father. And one of them, Helen told herself, a memory of Troy that showed how strange her years inside the city had been. She told of a time when Odysseus had crept into besieged Troy alone in disguise, dressed as a ragged beggar, scarred and filthy to spy out the city. And she, Helen, had recognised him through the disguise, had known him for who he was and had not betrayed him.

She had taken him in and bathed him and questioned him quietly and sworn not to give him away, and had let him go back to the Greek camp with what he had learned, for already, she said, her heart had been turning back toward her home and her first husband. Already she had begun to repent of the madness that the goddess had laid upon her. It is a remarkable scene, Helen years later in her own peaceful hall, telling the son of Odysseus how she had once protected his father inside the very city that was at war for her sake.

And there is in it a quiet image of a woman who had, even in the worst of her captivity, kept some thread of loyalty to the people she had left, and who had come home at last to tell of it by her own half. And when the talk at the table turned to the deeper sorrows of the war and grief began to gather over the guests, Helen, the story says, quietly slipped a drug into the wine, a gentle drug she had been given long ago in Egypt, a drug that soothed grief and anger and lulled the painful memories to rest, so that those who drank it could speak of even the saddest things without weeping, held in a soft calm.

It is a lovely thing that the woman who had been the cause of so much grief became, in her old age, the one who knew how to soften grief, who poured the drug of forgetting into the cup, who had learned, perhaps from her own long sorrow, how to give others a few hours of peace from the weight of memory. The most beautiful woman in the world ended her story not as a prize or a curse, but as a quiet healer in a peaceful hall, easing the pain of others as the evening drew in. And now we come to the strangest version of all, the gentlest. The one that turns the whole story over and shows us it's hidden under side, and it is the one we will carry with us towards sleep. For there was an old tradition held by certain poets that said Helen never went to Troy at all. The poets to Icarus, the old story tells us, once wrote a poem blaming Helen for the war and was struck blind for it and understood that he had offended the gods by slandering the daughter of Zeus and so he wrote a second poem, a retraction, in which he sang that the first poem had not been true, that Helen had never sailed to Troy, that she had never crossed the sea in the dark ships. And when he had sung the truth, his sight was restored to him.

In this telling, taken up later by the poet Euripides in a whole strange and beautiful play, what Paris carried away to Troy was not Helen at all, but a phantom of her, an image made of cloud and air in her exact likeness, fashioned by the gods. A breathing shadow that looked and moved and spoke exactly like Helen, but was not Helen. And the real Helen, the true woman, was carried away by the gods to Egypt, to the household of a good and pious king beside the River Nile, and there she waited out the whole long war, faithful and unharmed, longing for her husband. While across the sea the Greeks and the Trojans fought and died, for ten years over a phantom, over an image, over a thing of cloud that had never been the woman herself at all. Think of that in the quiet as you lie there. The whole great war, the thousand ships, the ten years, the fallen city, all the deaths of all the heroes, all of it fought over an image, a likeness, a beautiful shadow, while the real woman sat far away in peace by a foreign river, blameless, waiting.

And when the war was over, in this telling Menelaus, sailing home, was wrecked upon the coast of Egypt. And there he found her, the true Helen, the real one. And learned that The woman he had, one back from the ruins of Troy, had been only the Phantom, which dissolved into the air the moment its work was done, and that his true wife had been here all along, faithful in Egypt. Having never wronged him at all, and the two of them, the King and the real Queen, were reunited and sailed home together the long misunderstanding ended. The innocent woman restored to the husband who had never truly lost her.

The Greeks held both of these stories at once. The guilty Helen and the innocent one, the Helen who went to Troy and the Helen who never left and they did not insist on choosing between them, because both said something true. The guilty Helen is the truth that beauty and desire can set the world on fire, and that great catastrophes can grow from a single act of passion. The innocent Helen is the truth that we are often blamed for things we did not do. That the image of a person can become a thing the whole world fights over while the real person, the true self underneath, stands apart, unknown, longing only to be seen as she truly is. Both Helens are real, both are Helen. And the old poets, who were wiser than they are sometimes given credit for being, let the two of them stand side by side and ask their listeners to hold both and to draw from each what comfort and what warning they could.

Good evening and welcome back if your mind has wandered through the long years of the war. The figures have multiplied, the swam on the Still River and the eggs in the Spartan Palace. The four children, half divine, the beautiful sister, the queen sister, the two brothers who became stars. The girl whose beauty drew trouble before she was grown. The crowd of powerful suitors and the clever oath that bound them all. The marriage to The Spartan King, the Daughter, the Years of Peace.

The Wedding of the Gods, the Golden Apple, the Three Goddesses on the Hillside, the Shepherd Prince and his Fatal Choice. The Guest in the House and the Leaving in the Night. The Thousand Ships gathered at all this, the Old King on the Wall who did not blame her. The naming of the heroes and the weeping for a lost home. The gentle Hector and the lament over his body. The wooden horse and the borrowed voices in the dark. The husband with the falling sword, the long wandering and the homecoming at last.

The quiet drug poured into the cup of grief. the Phantom of Cloud and the true woman waiting in Egypt by the river. Let those images settle, like stones settling to the bed of a clear river, finding their places one by one in the long record of her story. There is a meaning the Greeks drew from the story of Helen and And it is worth holding for a moment before we let the whole tale loosen towards sleep. It is, more than almost any other Greek story, a meditation on beauty and on the strange and heavy fate of being beautiful.

Helen did almost nothing in her own story. She was born beautiful, which she did not choose. She was married off, which she did not choose. She was promised to Paris by a goddess which she did not choose. She was carried away or went. Under a compulsion she could barely distinguish from her own will. The war was fought in her name, but not by her doing. She is in a strange way the most passive figure in her own great tale. a woman to whom everything is done, and yet she is held responsible for all of it, blamed by an entire world for a catastrophe she set in motion only by existing, only by being what she was made to be.

The Greeks felt the injustice of this, even as they told the story, and that is why they They invented the phantom and the innocent Helen in Egypt to set beside the guilty one. They were trying to do justice across many centuries to a woman their own stories had wronged. It simply was, in the old imagination, that great beauty was a kind of fate, neither a blessing or a curse exactly, but await a destiny laid upon a person from outside, that drew the desire and the envy and the violence of the world toward them whether they wished it or not.

The beautiful person in the old stories is rarely free. They are sought, seized, fought over, blamed, their beauty belongs in a sense to everyone but themselves. And there is in Helen's story a deep and quiet compassion for anyone who has ever been seen only for their surface, valued only for what they appeared to be, fought over as an image while the true self underneath stood unregarded, longing, like the real Helen, the Nile, only to be known as they truly were. There is something too in the way the whole world in her story chases an image rather than a person. The men who fought for ten years over Helen did not, most of them, know her at all. They had never spoken with her.

They fought for a name, a rumour, a face glimpsed or only imagined, an idea of beauty they had agreed among themselves was worth dying for. And the deepest version of her tale, the one in which a mere phantom of cloud went to Troy while the true woman waited far away, only makes plain what was already true of all the others. So what the world pursues with such violence is so often not the real thing at all, but a glittering image of it, a shape made of their own longing, projected onto a person who can never quite be the thing they have decided to see.

The Greeks, in giving Helen a phantom double, were telling a truth about all desire, that it fixes on an image, and that the living person behind the image is almost always somewhere else. Quieter, more ordinary, more real and largely unseen. To be loved for an image is its own kind of loneliness, and Helen knew it more completely than anyone who has ever lived. And there is the gentler meaning, the one held in that last image of the older Helen in her peaceful hall, pouring the soothing drug into the cup of grief. For the woman who had been the cause of so much sorrow became, at the last, the who knew how to ease it. She had suffered greatly in her long strange life and out of that suffering she had learned something about the soothing of pain, about the granting of a few hours of forgetting, about the kindness of helping others set down for a little while the weight of their hardest memories. There is something in that for the listener tonight who may also be carrying memories that press, and who may now, as the evening drug of sleep begins to work, be allowed to set them down for a few hours and rest.

The night is older now, and the story has carried us far. Let us gather the figures and let them settle, the great white swan gliding down onto the still Spartan water, the strange eggs, and the four half-divine children born from them, the brothers, castor and pollocks, who would become the bright twin stars over the winter sea, the girl whose beauty was famous before she was grown. The crowd of kings come courting and Odysseus with his clever oath that bound them all to defend the marriage. The Spartan king Menelaus, and the daughter Hermione, and the years of quiet, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and The golden apple of discord rolled among the guests, the three great goddesses on the slopes of Eda and the shepherd prince who judged them.

The guest received with honour and the ship that sailed in the night. The thousand ships gathered at all this under the old broken oath. the high walls of Troy, and the ten long years beneath them, the old king Priam on the rampart, who held the gods at fault and not the woman. Helen naming the Greek heroes from the wall and weeping for her lost home and her vanished brothers, the gentle Hector, her one friend in the city and her lament when he fell. The soft and cowardly prince she came to despise.

The great wooden horse standing silent in the night, Helen walking around it, calling in the borrowed voices of distant wives. The burning city and the husband whose raised sword fell from his hand at the sight of her face, the long wandering home by way of Egypt, the peaceful hall at last, and the gracious queen pouring the gentle drug into the cup of grief, and the strangest figure of all, the phantom of cloud that went to Troy in her place, while the true and innocent woman waited out the war in peace beside a far river.

These are the figures of her story and you do not have to hold them. They are mentioned only so that they may settle. Let the names drift down like leaves into water, let the images soften, let the long story of the most beautiful woman in the world become a quiet weight in the room. The way a loom standing finished and still in a darkened hall is a quiet wait, its long work woven, its threads at rest, asking nothing of anyone now but to stand quietly in the dark. Now, let the story loosen the way every long-telling must when sleep approaches.

Let the high walls of Troy stand quiet in the moonlight. The long war over, the fires of the fallen city long since cooled, The stones groan calm under the stars. Let the thousand ships rest, drawn up on far shores, or sunk to a deep and peaceful sleep beneath the sea. Their long crossing done. Let the golden apple lie forgotten in the grass of a hillside, where no one walks any more. Its quarrel ended, its mischief spent. Let the great wooden horse stand empty and harmless in the memory, its warriors long gone into the songs. Let Hector sleep in honor within the walls he died defending.

Let Paris and the heroes of both sides rest wherever their own stories lay them down. Let Menelaus and Helens sleep at last in the rich, quiet palace beneath the Spartan hills, reconciled, the long, dark dream of the war folded away behind them. Let the brothers, Castor and Pollock shine softly and steadily over the winter sea, the bright twin stars watching over sailors in the dark, and let Helen herself rest in whichever of her stories you wish to leave her, the queen groan gentle in her peaceful hall, easing the grief of others or the innocent woman by the far river, blameless and waiting. The phantom dissolved, long misunderstanding ended, known at last for what she truly was.

Good evening and welcome back, one last time, to the slow, gentle work of letting the story rest. The night has carried Helen a long way, from a swan on a Spartan River to a peaceful hall and a quiet old age, and to the strange far river of Egypt, where the true woman waited out the war. There are many other tellings of her, many other moments, many other voices that sang of her across the long centuries, some in blame, some in pity, some in wonder. But that is a story for another day. The grove of her mythology is wide enough that no single night can walk all its paths. There is a final image the old singers like to leave with their listeners at the end of a tale of Helen. It is the image of a woman at a loom in a quiet upper room weaving. For in the great poem of the war, when we first meet Helen inside Troy, she is found at her loom, weaving into a great purple cloth, the very battles that were being fought below her on the plain, the struggles of the Trojans and the Greeks, The war that was being waged for her own sake.

She wove the war into the cloth, the old poet says, the spear thrusts and the chariots and the deaths, working the great sorrow of her life into a thing of patient beauty, thread by thread, in the quiet of her room above the fighting. It is a strange and haunting picture, the cause of the war, sitting apart from it, weaving its image into cloth, turning the catastrophe she had set in motion into something slow and made and beautiful. The only thing perhaps that she could do with it, the only mastery left to her, to take the chaos of her fate and weave it patiently by hand into a pattern she could hold. And so we leave her in the quiet upper room, the loom standing before her, the purple thread passing slowly through the warp, the war below her, growing distant, the evening coming on, her hands moving in the old slow rhythm of the weaver until the light fades from the room, and even she, at last, lays down the shuttle and rests.

For now, remember this, tonight the work of the tale is done. It simply was like all old stories, the carrying of the most beautiful woman in the world through the long inheritance of knights. Let the names settle. Let the rooms settle. Let the night gather you up. Imagine the high walls of Troy and the thousand ships and the long, bitter war far behind you, the golden apple and the burning city, and the borrowed voices in the dark no longer pressing on your thoughts. In your mind, reach back and close an invisible door to the doomed and shining city, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing beauty, blame, longing and the long war in calm and order.