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Authors: Bettany Hughes
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with ‘many suitors [who] came from outside Greece also because of Helen’s beauty and the power of her brothers and father’. 33 Dio’s rationale for Paris’ being at Sparta is carefully laid out; Troy was close to the Greek mainland, there was ‘much intercourse between the Trojans and the Greeks’, and the Trojan prince had with him, courtesy of his father King Priam – one of the wealthiest men in Asia – coffers packed with Asian gold.
By travelling back to Troy with Helen, in Herodotus’ account, the Trojan prince protests he was simply claiming what was his by rights. Swept off-course and onto the coast of Egypt, he swore blind in front of the Egyptian king that he too had been invited to compete for Helen, and that he (and his boatful of Trojan treasures) had, in fact, won the day. The King of Egypt, Proteus, unconvinced, is appalled by Paris’ story. He rages – not at the rape, theft and abduction of a wife, but at the flagrant flouting of the unspoken international law of
xenia
. This was simply not the way to behave. Proteus confiscates Helen and the Spartan treasure and gives Paris three days to leave town. It was only local custom that stopped the Egyptian king slaughtering Paris on the spot. 34 Even if Paris was, by rights, the warrior who should have claimed Helen from her father Tyndareus, by stealing Helen he abused something far more important than a woman.
Herodotus is keen to emphasise that his research is cutting-edge and Dio Chrysostom overtly sells an anti-Homer line, endeavouring to prove that the great bard had got it all wrong. But still, could a Bronze Age Paris have been one of Helen’s suitors? An Anatolian hero who joined the Greek warriors to compete for a young heiress’ hand in King Tyndareus’ domain? Was a Spartan princess perhaps betrothed as a child – as Hittite sources tell us many aristocrats were – to a foreign potentate? Were the gifts that Paris brought exchange for a promised Greek princess? Contemporary sources are full of references to fine objects and talents of gold being sent across the seas in return for a bride; we know the Mycenaeans and the Trojans had a close relationship. 35 Did the Greeks steal back a royal womanwho was by rights Trojan property? Once again, in the absence of a written history this is
all
speculation, but perfectly possible.
The setting for Helen and Paris’ infidelity – embellished and adapted down the centuries – has all the ingredients of a pot-boiler, but it also encompasses central characteristics of the Late Bronze Age. The courts of the 13th century BC would certainly have hosted foreign envoys. Princes, kings and queens would have showered each other with gifts, they would have slept in each other’s beds and married each other’s women. There is too written evidence that there were acrid disputes between clan-leaders both over the inanimate and the living treasures that exchanged hands.
One, particularly pertinent, diplomatic crisis demonstrates that the bad behaviour of a Late Bronze Age female aristocrat could send ructions throughout the region.
Around 1230 BC , Hittite negotiators had been brought in to negotiate peace between two states on the brink of war. 36 The King of Ugarit, Ammistamru II, had married the daughter of the King of Amurru, a man called Benteshina. As was usual with such bridal arrangements, the marriage was a diplomatic one, intended to strengthen the alliance between these two vassal states of the great Hittite Empire. But things did not go according to plan. Shockingly, the girl was sent back to Amurru in disgrace. From the language used in the correspondence it was clear that while in the Ugarit court, the young woman had transgressed some deep-seated code of behaviour: ‘
she has only sought to do him harm
’, the text of the divorce says. It is hard to imagine what she could possibly have done – other than have refused to sleep with the king or, even worse, have slept with someone
By travelling back to Troy with Helen, in Herodotus’ account, the Trojan prince protests he was simply claiming what was his by rights. Swept off-course and onto the coast of Egypt, he swore blind in front of the Egyptian king that he too had been invited to compete for Helen, and that he (and his boatful of Trojan treasures) had, in fact, won the day. The King of Egypt, Proteus, unconvinced, is appalled by Paris’ story. He rages – not at the rape, theft and abduction of a wife, but at the flagrant flouting of the unspoken international law of
xenia
. This was simply not the way to behave. Proteus confiscates Helen and the Spartan treasure and gives Paris three days to leave town. It was only local custom that stopped the Egyptian king slaughtering Paris on the spot. 34 Even if Paris was, by rights, the warrior who should have claimed Helen from her father Tyndareus, by stealing Helen he abused something far more important than a woman.
Herodotus is keen to emphasise that his research is cutting-edge and Dio Chrysostom overtly sells an anti-Homer line, endeavouring to prove that the great bard had got it all wrong. But still, could a Bronze Age Paris have been one of Helen’s suitors? An Anatolian hero who joined the Greek warriors to compete for a young heiress’ hand in King Tyndareus’ domain? Was a Spartan princess perhaps betrothed as a child – as Hittite sources tell us many aristocrats were – to a foreign potentate? Were the gifts that Paris brought exchange for a promised Greek princess? Contemporary sources are full of references to fine objects and talents of gold being sent across the seas in return for a bride; we know the Mycenaeans and the Trojans had a close relationship. 35 Did the Greeks steal back a royal womanwho was by rights Trojan property? Once again, in the absence of a written history this is
all
speculation, but perfectly possible.
The setting for Helen and Paris’ infidelity – embellished and adapted down the centuries – has all the ingredients of a pot-boiler, but it also encompasses central characteristics of the Late Bronze Age. The courts of the 13th century BC would certainly have hosted foreign envoys. Princes, kings and queens would have showered each other with gifts, they would have slept in each other’s beds and married each other’s women. There is too written evidence that there were acrid disputes between clan-leaders both over the inanimate and the living treasures that exchanged hands.
One, particularly pertinent, diplomatic crisis demonstrates that the bad behaviour of a Late Bronze Age female aristocrat could send ructions throughout the region.
Around 1230 BC , Hittite negotiators had been brought in to negotiate peace between two states on the brink of war. 36 The King of Ugarit, Ammistamru II, had married the daughter of the King of Amurru, a man called Benteshina. As was usual with such bridal arrangements, the marriage was a diplomatic one, intended to strengthen the alliance between these two vassal states of the great Hittite Empire. But things did not go according to plan. Shockingly, the girl was sent back to Amurru in disgrace. From the language used in the correspondence it was clear that while in the Ugarit court, the young woman had transgressed some deep-seated code of behaviour: ‘
she has only sought to do him harm
’, the text of the divorce says. It is hard to imagine what she could possibly have done – other than have refused to sleep with the king or, even worse, have slept with someone
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