Who said i alone brought down troy

We the other half raised the anchor and scooted off; some of us Sailed very swiftly, and God smoothed the monster-bearing expanse. Landing in Tenedos, we sacrificed sacrifices to the gods, With the hope of returning home; but Skyer did not yet plan our homecoming, Harsh one.

He aroused again yet a second quarrel. Some of them turned back and boarded the curved ships Led by the battle-minded astute lord Woedious [Odysseus], Doing a favor to Intrepidson Primesetter; But I fled with the company of ships that followed me Since I knew the divinity was devising disasters.

After a long time, blond Setarmy [Menelaos] joined us And reached us in Lesbos driven by his long sails. For the two of us sailed together from Bruiseland [Troy [ 36 ] ], Intrepidson [the son of Atreus [ 37 ] ] and I, holding each other dear. Thus, he was held back, though eager for his journey, So that he could bury his companion and perform the burial rites.

Then he scattered our company of ships, sending some to Crete, Where the Kydonians lived around the streams of Iardanos. There is a smooth, steep rock in the sea On the border of Gortyn in the misty sea: Where the south wind drives the large wave toward the headland on the left Toward Phaistos, and a small rock keeps the large wave away Some of the ships came there, and the men hardly avoided destruction As the waves dashed the ships against the waves Borne by the wind and the water, the five dark-prowed ships drew near Egypt.

Gather there much livelihood and gold, He wandered there with his ships among foreign-speaking men Meanwhile, Goatskinnen [Aegisthus] was devising baneful plans at home. While the three survivors of the Trojan War in the Odyssey miss every single opportunity to say that they saw Helen at Troy or recovered her from there, the narrative also undermines the credibility of the only two witnesses who allude to her presence at Troy by making them unreliable.

The first witness, Helen herself, makes her appearance for the first time in the Odyssey in the context of the narrator asserting her former sojourn in Egypt. Almost as a sort of ironic warning, the very first sentences Helen then utters problematizes the truth of verbal claims, including her own 4. In fact, she does not even give him a chance to answer her rhetorical question, because she will provide the answer herself.

Like the other daughters of Zeus her sisters the Muses in the Hesiodic Theogony , Helen proclaims that truth is only an option and highlights the significance of her impulses in her decision making. The reliability of her testimony is further undermined by the drug that she mixes into the drink of her husband and their two young guests 4. Thither you [Helen] came, you were urged on By a divinity, who wished to extend glory to the Bruisans; And Battleterror [Deiphobos] the Godlike went along with you, Thrice you circled the hollow ambush touching it, And you called by name the best of the Donaans [Danaans] Imitating the voice of the wives of all the Lucent, Tydeuson and I and resplendent Woedious Sitting in the middle heard how you shouted The two of us burned with the desire either to react And rush out, or reply at once from inside: But Woedious restrained us, so we stopped, eager though we were.

Then all the others stayed quiet, sons of the Achers, Rumorresponder-Callback [Antiklos] alone wished to answer you With words, but Woedious firmly pressed his jaws shut With his strong hands, and saved all the Achers. Now, the alleged scene of Menelaos hearing Helen at Troy, not seeing Helen at Troy, as she attempts to pass off as real that which is false, points back to the Muses.

Let us turn to Iliad 2. Could her deceit extend to her very own identity? How does he know, since he was inside the Trojan Horse? According to legend, Helen punished Stesichorus by blinding him for alleging that he had slandered her, but restored his sight when he recanted in his palinode his earlier claim that she had actually betrayed her husband and gone to Troy. Thus, the Homeric Odyssey can be read as a palinode of sorts in relation to the Homeric Iliad.

Allan, W. Cambridge University Press, De Armond, T. Boedeker, Deborah Dickmann. Brill, Burgess, J. Johns Hopkins University Press, Burkert, W. Greek Religion. Clader, L. EJ Brill, Detienne, M. Edmunds, L. Farnell, L.

The Cults of the Greek States. Clarendon Press, Frame, D. Yale University Press, Frame, Douglas. Hippota Nestor. Hall, Jonathan M. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Hunter, Richard. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry. Jackson, P. Janda, M. Lord, A. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy. Lowenstam, S. Lyons, D. Princeton University Press, Millington, M. Nagy, G. Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter. As many as nine sets may have been woven.

Jacopo Tintoretto: Briseis and Achilles , sixteenth century. While Barker employs vernacular language to reduce the gap between past and present, Miller strives for a more archaic feel. Wielding her feminist sword with cutting gusto, Haynes allows Calliope to ensure that Homer is punished for presuming to give a subordinate role to the women of his great song cycles.

Crafty Odysseus meets his match in a skeptical wife whom he has already kept waiting through a decade of distant warfare. A garrulous wandering bard has brought the story of his travels back to his abandoned queen in Ithaca. How can she be so certain? A long, long way beneath you. Other women may feel differently, but the powerful voices I remember first hearing from the ancient world were those of Clytemnestra, Electra, and Medea. A vengeful mother whose husband had killed their child to bring a fair wind for the voyage to Troy ; a grief-stricken daughter who had seen her father slain in his own palace; a betrayed and unforgiving wife: the playwrights turned them into flesh-and-blood women rather than capricious goddesses, all justifiably furious, all bent on obtaining revenge in a way that seemed to a young female reader transgressive, visceral, and thrillingly credible.

The ancient poets and playwrights could be as crudely funny and consciously contemporary as Barker in The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy. The enemy. Silence, at moments like this, seems not such a bad idea.

In another striking scene, Barker places Briseis alone in a dark storeroom among an army of ghosts:. I closed my eyes, and gradually—this was a slow process—I felt a presence growing in the darkness behind me. Opening my eyes, I forced myself to lift the lantern high above my head—and cried out with shock.

Because there, lined along the far wall, stood Priam, Hector, Patroclus, Achilles…. What I was seeing were suits of armour…fastened to the walls, each piece in its proper place, so that together they formed the shapes of men. Barker has sometimes described writing as an almost clairvoyant experience, a characterization that undervalues both her formidably precise and detailed research and the strength of her prose. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest.

Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today. She is working on a biography of Jean Rhys. December Read Next. The movie does not celebrate the dangerous power of female beauty but denies it by means of an array of strategies, some of which echo ancient texts and some of which are specific to contemporary ideology and the cinematic medium.

Helen is presented as a hapless victim, cast as an adolescent everygirl and contrasted with the feisty Briseis. Once again, Helen is displaced by Achilles. Female power poses notorious problems for ancient Greek culture. Because Greek ideology and cultural practice both place severe restrictions on female agency, it is difficult for women to exercise power without transgressing the norms constituted to regulate their behaviour. Insofar as female danger is wrapped up with sexual transgression, then, so is female power.

And insofar as sex is bound up with beauty, Helen of Troy — by definition the most beautiful woman of all time — is also the most dangerous of women. Her godlike beauty grants her supreme erotic power over men, a power that resulted in what was, in Greek eyes, the most devastating war of all time.

Helen is often coupled with Achilles as a cause of the enormous destruction of the Trojan War. The supreme expression of masculinity is predicated on the supreme expression of the feminine. Having constructed female beauty as dangerous, and imagined an absolute standard of beauty fulfilled by a single extraordinary woman in whom such danger culminates, Greek culture devotes considerable energy to attempting to control or deny the power of its own creation.

Blaming Helen is the most obvious way to contain her, by subjecting her to social control while still enabling her to serve as a convenient scapegoat for the Trojan War. Blame is an acknowledgment of power, both because it implies agency in its object and because it recognizes that object as sufficiently threatening to require humiliation in order to constrain the irresponsible exercise of power.

The long history of defences of Helen makes sense as an attempt to disarm her. Such strategies of containment are arguably more effective than the more obvious discourse of blame, since they attempt to erase the transgressive Helen rather than merely chastising her.

Yet, they still depend on the problem of her dangerous power. Significantly, no ancient Greek account simply eliminates Helen or her beauty from the tale of Troy, or denies that the war took place at all.

And insofar as she is conceptually essential to the Trojan War, she is also essential to ancient Greek constructions of Greek identity — more specifically, masculine identity.

That identity, it seems, inextricably predicates the achievement s of manhood on the danger of female beauty and its containment. Greek warriors must fight in deed to control the person of Helen or its phantasmic representations, and Greek authors must fight in word to contain her power by manipulating her story.

Achilles is predicated upon Helen. Despite the enormous distances — in time, space, culture — that divide Hollywood from the ancient Greeks, Helen remains an object of fascination and a site for the exploration of contemporary identities.

Despite a veneer of feminism, the movie does not celebrate the dangerous power of female beauty but denies it by means of an array of strategies, some of which echo ancient texts and some of which are specific to contemporary ideology and the cinematic medium.

The Iliadic Helen is simultaneously dangerous and sympathetic. The sympathy depends on a substantial eclipse of the danger, yet her power still glimmers round the edges.

She appears swathed in shimmering garments, ambiguous, elusive and liminal. She is not the only reason for the Trojan War, but she is a real one, and as such indispensable. Though Helen may serve as a pretext, she is not merely a pretext. No Greek blames her for her transgression. As for the Trojans, Helen tells us she fears, or is subject to, shame and reproach from various people e. This occurs in the same famous scene in which we witness her impact on the Trojan elders.

Her effect upon men, which both explains and justifies the war, makes it impossible for the poet to show Helen blamed face-to-face.

Yet, this avoidance of blame also disempowers Helen, since it denies her any responsibility for causing the war and thus any agency in her own elopement. As has often been observed, the only direct abuse of Helen in the Iliad comes from Helen herself. If Helen herself avows her guilt, then who are we — or Priam — to disagree? Yet, this avowal also frees the poet to present the Achaians and Trojans fighting heroically for an object that is uncontaminated by their own disparagement.

Since she blames herself so stringently, they are freed from the necessity of doing so. She has — conveniently — put herself in her place, so that they do not have to. Moreover, her remorse helps to characterize her positively in a specifically gendered fashion. The Iliadic Helen also misses Menelaus 3. This preference for Menelaus amounts to a confession that her elopement with Paris was wrong, not just ethically, but as a decision affecting her own happiness.

The point is reinforced by the fact that she also misses her parents, relatives and friends 3. In the Odyssey , we see the consequences of the re-established status quo: an elegant if uneasy and passionless 17 alliance between husband and wife, accompanied by an extraordinary level of affluence and comfort. All things considered, Menelaus seems to have been worth coming home to.

But they also provide her with a space in which to assert her own subjectivity and reclaim the agency denied to her by men. As an assertion of past agency, her self-blame may be viewed as an attempt to retain a trace of the subjectivity of her original transgression. Where others blame only Paris, Helen links them as jointly responsible, implicitly placing their agency on an equal footing 6.

She clearly retains a sense of her own agency regarding the elopement and its disastrous consequences. The abusive language she uses of herself reinforces this, both by implicitly claiming agency and by conjuring her as a menacing, destructive figure.

By appropriating that discourse Helen implies that she owns such power. Her self-blame is, in its way, an act of defiance. Helen also remains powerful in Homer in a different way. This verbal skill is complicit with her beauty in disarming external blame. When we first encounter her she is weaving a tapestry that represents the armies fighting over her 3. This role as weaver of the Trojan War aligns her both with the poet and with Zeus himself, whose plan is fulfilled through that war.

Her self-presentation is smuggled into the masculine narrative of the war as a whole, ensuring the survival of her voice as long as the epic itself survives. Despite the fascination of the Iliadic Helen, and her pivotal role as cause of the Trojan War, Achilles usurps what might have been her story.

The Iliad does not pretend otherwise: it is the tale of the wrath of Achilles. Like most recent treatments of the tale, it proceeds from that initial romance to the final destruction of Troy in a way that the Iliad pointedly does not. Love your woman. And even he ends up endorsing heterosexual romance. He abandons the quest for glory through conquest, using his supreme strength only to seek out Briseis amid the blazing ruins and actually killing men on his own side who are molesting her.

That expectation is not met. Rather, her significance is diminished. Some were fought for land, some for power, some for glory. Why it makes sense is not explained. In stark contrast to many of the most prominent ancient Greek heroes, the romantic hero and heroine must be likeable. They may have minor flaws, but these must not be of a kind that risks undermining the sympathies of the audience.

Also unlike Homeric heroes, romantic heroes need not be powerful. In fact, power is something of a drawback, since it tends to undermine sympathy, at least according to the sensibilities of modern audiences who expect even their warrior heroes to be temporarily down — if not quite out — before they rise to ultimate victory. An easy way to make Paris and Helen innocent victims in the eyes of a modern movie audience would be to portray them as puppets of the gods — Helen merely a gift to Paris from Aphrodite in consideration of services rendered.

This purportedly transhistorical human nature turns out, of course, to look remarkably modern. The gods are therefore ruled out as a vehicle with which to engineer sympathy for the romantic dyad. This gives the impression of empowering Helen by freeing her from divine control. Yet ironically, it lessens her power from an ancient perspective.

In Greek myth, her semi-divine parentage and her intimate connection with Aphrodite are marks of exceptional status, which enhance, rather than detract from, the significance of her actions. The medium of film supplies many creative possibilities for such effects. It leaves no room for her divine traces, for any suggestion that her beauty is other-worldly, transcendently desirable, or sinister in its power.

Eliminating the gods means that some other way must be found to sustain our sympathy for Helen, by minimizing, if not excusing, her transgression. She leaves no daughter behind her in Sparta — a standard feature of the ancient story including the Iliad , and a standard cause for reproach by herself and others.

In contrast to her Homeric counterpart, this Helen shows no trace of ambivalence towards Paris, even after he provides an excruciating display of cowardice in his duel with Menelaus.