What did Helen look like?

The splendid Sententiae Antiquae blog tackles the almost eternal question of Helen's appearance:

What Helen actually looks like is never stated in Homer. When the Trojans look at her, they say she has the “terrible appearance of goddesses” (αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν). This, of course, is not terribly specific.. . . 

To stay with the ancient world, think of that seminal first stanza in Sappho fr. 16: 

Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
[whatever] you love 

Οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων,
οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ’ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν
ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον, ἐγὼ δὲ κῆν’ ὄτ-
τω τις ἔραται 

As long as beauty is relative and in the eye of the beholder any time we disambiguate it by saying that it is one thing and not another we depart from an abstract timeless idea and create something more bounded and less open to audience engagement. I think that part of what makes Homeric poetry work so well is that it combines a maximum amount of specificity within a maximized amount of ambiguity. 

Paris and Helen

Nagy on Sappho and Homeric song

A key distinction made by Erich Auerbach in "Odysseus' Scar," the first chapter of Mimesis, comes through his differentiation of legend and history:

Now the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader.. . . .Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events!

The distinguished Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy describes Homeric remembering as linked to oral song:

The process of remembering in ancient Greek song culture requires a special medium,song. When I say song here, I include poetry, even though the word poetry in modern usage is understood to be different from song. In the ancient Greek song culture, however, both poetry and song are understood to be a medium of singing. And such singing is an oral tradition. The epic poetry of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey derives from such an oral tradition of singing, which is a process of composition-in-performance. That is, composition is an aspect of performance and vice versa. In this kind of oral tradition, there is no script, since the technology of writing is not required for composition-in-performance. In Homeric poetry, the basic medium of remembering is heroic song or kleos. 

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, Prof. Nagy will offer a talk relating this notion of song to the work of Sappho. The talk will be offered live online here at 11:30 am.

Where words work: Anne Carson on Greek

A friend in California shared this observation of Anne Carson's (author of Eros the Bittersweet and translator of Sappho):

"I don’t know every language in the world—maybe if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differently—but there’s something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern language. So that when you’re reading it, you’re down in the roots of where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming."

It's an excerpt from an interview published in full here.

The Chorus's war-torn ode to Love

The stasimon to Eros punctuates the dialogue between Phaedra and the Nurse in Hippolytus scene 2. Scene 3 will begin with Phaedra silencing the Chorus so she can overhear what is being said, inside the palace, between Hippolytus and the Nurse. 

The chorus begins by calling on Eros:

Ἔρως Ἔρως, ὁ κατ᾽ ὀμμάτων

στάζων πόθον, εἰσάγων γλυκεῖαν

ψυχᾷ χάριν οὓς ἐπιστρατεύσῃ

Eros, Eros, shedding yearning upon the eyes, bringing sweet pleasure to the souls of those against whom you make war. (Kovacs, modified by me).

Eros and War fuse in the descriptive ἐπιστρατεύσῃ -- march upon, make war. The verb is cognate with the noun strategos, "general," which is the root of the English word strategy.

The ode is far too rich to do justice to it here. A few notes will have to do. The next strophe gives us Eros as the τύραννον ἀνδρῶν, king of men, who holds the keys to the sweetest inner chamber of Aphrodite:

τὸν τᾶς Ἀφροδίτας

540  φιλτάτων θαλάμων κλῃδοῦχον

The third strophe begins with Iole, the virgin child ("foal") of Eurytus, and ends in her marriage to Heracles, rank with the blood and smoke of her father's city. 

545  τὰν μὲν Οἰχαλίᾳ

πῶλον ἄζυγα λέκτρων, ἄναν-

δρον τὸ πρὶν καὶ ἄνυμφον, οἴ-

κων ζεύξασ᾽ ἀπ᾽ Εὐρυτίων

550 δρομάδα ναΐδ᾽ ὅπως τε βάκ-

χαν σὺν αἵματι, σὺν καπνῷ,

φονίοισι νυμφείοις

Ἀλκμήνας τόκῳ Κύπρις ἐξέδωκεν:

ὦ τλάμων ὑμεναίων.

That filly in Oechalia, unyoked as yet to marriage-bed, unhusbanded, unwed, Cypris took from the house of her father Eurytus [550] and yoked her like a footloose Naiad or a Bacchant and gave her—to the accompaniment of bloodshed and smoke, with bloody bridal—to Alcmene's son. O unhappy in her marriage!

Eurytus was the grandson of Apollo and king of Oechalia who taught Heracles how to use a bow. But when the hero won his teacher's archery contest and Iole, he was shown the door. He returned to claim his prize with extreme prejudice.

Archers are usually linked with Apollonian mastery -- aiming and hitting your target from a distance -- precisely what "not missing the mark" (see Nurse 507) means. The ordered Apollonian world of Oechalia and Iole's expectation of a harmonious hymeneal are wrecked by Heracles, ruled by the τύραννον ἀνδρῶν.

The final strophe depicts Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, incinerated by the βροντᾷ γὰρ ἀμφιπύρῳ "Double blazing thunder" of the king of the gods. Can we say there's a progression in power from the key-holding Eros in the second strophe to Heracles to Zeus? As well as from chamber door to marital bed to womb holding Bacchus? Or would this be our interpretive effort going astray (hamartia) under the pressure of the inevitable desire for order?

(Speaking of going astray, I misspoke earlier today: Eurytus's bow was a gift of his grandfather Apollo, and it passed, via Eurytus's son Iphitus, to Odysseus. A different bow passed from Heracles to Philoctetes. It too might have been a gift from Apollo, but different from that of Eurytus.)

Much more could be said about this ode. The audience need not accept the chorus's vision of Eros either as the sole view or the author's view. Other images of love appear in the play.

The yoking of love and war is a familiar topos in Greek literature. Here's the unforgettable beginning of Sappho's Fragment 16:

Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
the one you love ... more