Customer Reviews

Helen of Troy: The Story Behind the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is up to Ms Hughes usual high standard. It discusses Helen in the context of the Bronze Age (including Homer) and how she has been regarded throughout history. The discussion about the Bronze Age and the Trojan War era is particularly thorough and reveals a great deal of knowledge about this little known time. For example when discussing (some) women's high status in the bronze age she points out that the Lion Gate Lions at Mycenae are in fact lionesses. The book is also interesting and entertaining and does not necessarily require some knowledge of the subject.

This is popular history. This work is not a history text. The reader needs to keep this in mind when starting this work. The author, in my opinion has done more than an excellent job. Her prose alone make the book worth the read. Granted, there is much speculation in this work, but if you read the author's comments, she is the first to point this fact out. That being said, with what we know today, and the author has done an amazing job of gathering her facts, then much of the life of Helen must be speculation. The author has given us this although I would choose the words "educated speculation" in the case of this work. I enjoyed ever word of it, learned a lot and was stimulated to read other works. What more could I ask for? Not only do we get a speculative look at a shadowy figure, but we get an excellent look at bronze age history. The author's discription of present day sights is absolutely wonderful and makes one want to travel.

As a side note, after years and years of reading and the study of history, I have found that an expert in the field of history does not absolutely have to have a worn tweed jacket,gray beard and monotone speech to know his or her subject.

Troy has always fascinated people and the "cause" of the Trojan war, the Spartan princess Helen, is now perhaps only second to Cleopatra in the modern iconography of ancient women. Indeed, while we are not even sure that a real Helen existed, there certainly was a Troy and a Sparta, and their histories, although now obscured by the mists of time and lack of contemporary written record, had to have been quite turbulent. Through the writings of Homer and others, Helen has come down to us as intelligent, obviously beautiful, and as either victim or schemer, goddess or mortal, violated virgin or whore. In any case something very bad happened to Troy around the projected time of Helen's life, even if she really did not exist.

Bettany Hughes in her lengthy (458 pp)"Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore" has covered the background of this period. Helen is part of a complex Greek mythology based on the early history of ancient Greece (including Magna Grecia - Modern Turkey, Crete, Cyprus etc.) The house of Atreus and the Tyndareids make modern dysfunctional families look tame, with cannibalism, incest, murder, torture, congress with gods, etc. commonplace. While Hughes concentrates on the story of Helen, these various behaviors occasionally come through, especially in regard to the murder of Agamaemnon by Clytemnestra, Helen's half sister, and Orestes subsequent murder of his mother and her lover, and later of Helen herself (if the later was not wafted up to Olympus as Apollo is said to have done.)

While Hughes certainly jazzes up the story a bit here and there(not exactly necessary as the story is pretty juicy from the word go) she presents a lot of very interesting material on the Trojan War (the later unfortunately made into a recent movie that somehow took a really fascinating story and made it boring!) and of Helen as an icon of that war.

I recommend this book as a solid, if sometimes speculative, summary of the life and times of Helen of Troy and the effect that her legend has had on the world's collective imagination.

Bettany Hughes' "Helen of Troy" might well have been called Helen of Troy and What People Think About Her, for both the historical Helen (if such a person actually existed) and people's reactions to the idea of Helen are at the heart of Ms. Hughes tale.

The author, an Oxford-trained historian, is also guest lecturer, writer, and the creator of PBS/BBC television specials, such as "The Spartans" and "Athens: Dawn of Democracy." In describing her "Helen," she says, "There is no single arterial route to the truth of Helen of Troy, but a number of paths that wind across time..." Her own quest begins by sifting through remaining Bronze Age shards and stories and then continues with a literate romp through evolving Western thought and opinion since that long ago time until our own.

Ms. Hughes calls her work an "historia." Those whose words or images are woven into its tapestry include: Euripides, Goethe, Yeats, Rimbaud, Camus, Ovid, Dante, Sappho, Rupert Brooke, Dorothy Parker, William Blake and Christopher Marlowe.

Her chronicler in chief, of course, is Homer. The masterworks we attribute to him were created during a time when a pre-literate oral tradition of singers was giving way in Greece to the written word. She describes this as a "fault-line in the development of European Literature." Those amazingly apt words give some idea of Ms. Hughes own writing skill.

She needs the skill. At 458 pages, "Helen" is stuffed text-book dense with facts, ideas and conjecture. As such, it could be a soporific far more potent than the largest turkey dinner. Instead, it's a joy to read. Even the notes are interesting. While Ms. Hughes writes about the past, her effort will, almost certainly, become the definitive "Helen" for the foreseeable future.

Because Helen's is a story that involves love, hate, lust, greed, fear and power, and because its origins are Greek, Ms. Hughes gives us (in passing) a somewhat more eclectic Greek vocabulary lesson than the ones probably contained in the syllabus at the local bible college.

Using Helen as the exploratory vehicle for her word journey, Ms. Hughes does indicate that women in general have been somewhat put upon in Western society. Other reviewers, in other places, have suggested that she views history through a Feminist lens. That may be true, but her rich, creamy English charm, her enthusiasm and the sheer weight of the evidence she presents prevent her story from devolving into a feminist tract. Instead, she brings even a Neanderthal male, such as this reviewer, much closer to her own viewpoint.

Bettany Hughes's "Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, and Whore" contains a good deal of information about the image of Helen of Troy (or, perhaps more accurately, "Helen of Sparta") in Classical Greece and thereafter, but it seems to me that there is a serious omission in the author's failure to solidly link that later image (or, those later images) with whatever historical figure stands behind the Helen of Homeric epics. Of course, it is impossible to show an actual historicality of Helen (just as we cannot prove there really was a historical Agamemnon or a historical Hector), but the author seems to assume that discussing the matter is irrelevant and that we should just accept the legendary Helen of Troy as fact. It is not that Hughes is ignorant of historical sources and evidence (she has incorporated into her text recent archaeological work at Troy and with Hittite clay tablet archives), but she evidently does not consider the question worth exploring. And this, to me, robs the book of an important element. I don't expect the author to conclusively prove that Helen really existed, but I would hope she has not just blindly accepted that as fact.

I would give the book good marks for its exploration of Helen's image through the centuries and even for its depiction of various rites and rituals of Classical Greece and before, but why should I believe that Spartan customs of the Fifth Century BCE are the same as, or even very similar to, those of several centuries earlier?

Hughes' writing certainly reflects what might be called a feminist sensibility, but that makes its conclusions neither wrong nor right. The lack of a rigorous discussion of historical evidence of the Late Bronze Age does, however, weaken its impact.

I think my fascination with Helen of Troy began when I first saw her picture in my beloved copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths [...]. She's in the foreground, indolently combing out her beautiful, long blond locks, not really paying attention to the warriors in the middle ground, one of whom is impaling the other with a long spear for her sake, while in the background, sitting on the walls of a burning Troy, are more interested spectators, the gods, cheering on their individual favorites. But this image of Helen as sort of the original femme fatale is just one of the many ways she has appeared throughout history, a fantastically prismatic and resonant character, as is made evident in this fascinating book by Bettany Hughes (interestingly enough the hardback subtitle was Goddess, Princess, [..] - I guess that last word didn't work for some people). It's just the kind of book I like, a multi-disciplinary exploration of a single theme, a combination of history, travel narrative, literary criticism and art history, all the muses analyzing the image of Helen.

Hughes seems to have read everything ever written about Helen, looked at every artwork portraying her and traveled to every spot associated with her, and weaves in the factual, the interpretive and the personal to produce a most compelling narrative. I read it slowly because I was so interested in every page that I didn't want it to end. I learned quite a few things, even though I've been a Helen fan for quite a while.

Helen of Troy isn't a perfect book - sometimes it seems a little choppy, as if all the pieces of the puzzle Hughes found don't quite fit together, and, indeed, there are a couple of shards she awkwardly sticks on at the end as appendices. I also wish the artwork had been better coordinated with the text, if not next to the reference at least with a parenthetical figure number pointing to the discussed work. But all in all it's an excellent, absorbing, intelligent read, and I highly recommend it.

Wonderful book - I expected just a history, which I got in abundance....SO well research. What I didn't expect was the idea of how the sense of "woman" has been shaped by this Helen gal. I didn't know she was the center of a type of worship, that she was such an influence on so much of later historic treatment of women. I hadn't considered her huge influence - why the fight over her? Was she that compelling? She must have been (I'm now convinced by the author) as there isn't any real description of how she looked...I LOVED the idea that some faceless woman was so compelling, unforgettable that her strength and courage helped change history, or what we believe of it. Have given it to several friends since, male and female, and all have appreciated and enjoyed it.

I have been studying the Trojan war for years and have finally found a book to help fill in the details of the other side of the story. Very little is known about the end of the Bronze age - archaeology was just invented a century ago- and not all are even convinced that a "Troy" even existed as written by Homer. I am a firm believer in Homer's Illiad and after visiting these sites in person I became even more enthusiastic about this lost time. Much has been written about this violent/turbulent age but few books have been written regarding Helen and the real details around her myth, possible life, and her position in history. Hughes packs so much into her book that I started taking notes on page 2! Facts and tidbits of info that I have never seen anywhere before. She makes some assumptions and guesses but she seems to be right on in her beliefs. I am going back to Greece in the near future to crawl over Sparta and Pylos and this heavy book will be in my scant luggage! Buy this book! I also suggest you check out her PBS video on Helen, so well done.

Hannibal

So far, I've read around 20 books on the Trojan War. Naturally Homer and Virgil are my favorites. But coming in right behind them is this gem. Ms. Hughes knows her stuff and she really makes the Bronze Age come alive.

The book's focus is on the appeal, influence, and longevity of Helen over the last 3200 years, and how various eras have reshaped and interpreted Helen and the Trojan War story to reflect their own values. Hughes examines Helen from the Spartan point of view, from the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Athenians, the Romans, the early Christians, the Gnostics, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and up through modern times. Poor Helen--some see here as a semi-divine being who epitomizes the power of beauty; others see here as a selfish whore. But at all times, she is larger than life and surrounded by the powerful forces of physical desire and death.

The book is about much more than Helen. The Trojan War stories and events from the Epic Cycle figure heavily in her narrative. To build her case, Hughes writes at length on Minoan culture (from Crete), various natural disasters that shifted the influences of regional culture and trade, the rise of Mycenaean culture, the relationship between Mycenae and Asia Minor (specifically Troy and the Hittites, of which Troy was a vassal city-state). And she frequently compares the ancient sources (Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Virgil, Sappho, Pausanias, and the Greek playwrights) with the most current archaeological evidence. These Iron Age writers were wrote of events that happened between 400 to 1000 years earlier; however, according to the archeological record, they seem to have gotten many of details right, even if some of the story grew to "epic" proportions. Again and again, Homer is proven to be accurate in attention to detail. This is a powerful testament to the ancient bardic oral tradition that was responsible for transmitting the stories, history, and major events of the day.

Hughes also suggests that the semi-divine Helen reflects a much older spiritual tradition where goddesses dominated the religious pantheon and women played a major role in their administration. In her eyes, Zeus is a relative latecomer who signifies a transition from the Bronze Age to the more male-dominated Iron Age. The evidence really does seem to be on Hughes' side here. It is clear that women played an important role in Mycenaean and Hittite politics, religious practices, and perhaps most importantly, the management and distribution of stored grains and other surplus foods. It seems that aristocratic Bronze Age women were highly respected, had a lot of political clout, and were taken very seriously.

The book is packed with information, but it is easy to read. Serious readers should also read the footnotes, which contain a bunch of great little factoids and interesting anecdotes. Along with the typical bibliography of scholarly resources, Hughes also includes a separate bibliography of ancient sources.

This is the best non-fiction work the Trojan War that I've read so far. It left me with a tremendous appreciation for the achievements and sophistication of these preliterate cultures, and for the rich cultural legacy that they have left us.

Highly recommended.

I love people who challange the ideas that history has set down. This book does just that. How many times have we thought of Helen of Troy simply as the trophy of the famous Trjoan War? She must have been more than that. In order for men to fight a 10 year war there must have been something more to Helen than meets the eye. A companion television production played on PBS recently and was excellent. Definately a good book for anyone interested in pursuing the real Helen in her own time.