Free Helen of Troy by Bettany Hughes Page B

And some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight On this dark earth; but I say it is whatever you desire:
    and it is perfectly possible to make this clear to all; for Helen, the woman who by far surpassed all others in her beauty, left her husband – the best of men –
    behind and sailed far away to Troy; she did not spare a single thought for her child nor for her dear parents but [the goddess of love] led her astray [to desire]
    S APPHO ,
Fragment 16
(7th century BC ) 1
    C OMPOSING WITHIN A HUNDRED YEARS OF HOMER , the female poet Sappho was certain that the Spartan queen seduced Paris, or was, at the very least, willing to go with him, certain that inspired as Helen was by the passion of Aphrodite, she was not stolen but left of her own free will.
    Sappho’s treatment of Helen is important for two reasons. The first – and most obvious – is that if you believe Sappho lived, she is a rare, surviving, female voice from the ancient world. 2 She does not write with a man’s idea of what Helen should be. The second reason is that Sappho was held in high esteem across centuries of antiquity. The Athenian lawgiverthe female of the species is more deadly than the male Solon was said to have memorised a Sappho song at a drinking party, ‘So that I can learn it and then die.’ 3 Plato talks of Sappho as one of the ‘wise men and women of old’. 4 In the Hellenistic period she was compared to Homer and was even honoured with the epithet ‘the 10th Muse’. 5 Her ideas mattered and so, partly because Sappho and her work were much talked and gossiped about, for centuries no one could quite shake off the idea that Paris might be Helen’s plaything, not vice versa.
    Along with Helen, Sappho is one of the few female figures from the ancient world who is still a household name. Yet virtually no historical evidence exists for her life. With the exception of one complete poem, nothing remains of her poetry but tattered fragments. When one looks down at these scraps, Fragment 16 is sandwiched between two glass sheets in the Bodleian Library in Oxford – a pathetically incomplete jigsaw – the poetry shows itself to be more absent than present. But when first examining the tiny pieces I realised that in the frieze of intellectual illuminati that had been painted around the walls of the library between AD 1615 and 1620, Sappho was the only woman depicted: testimony to the acumen of the scant words that have survived.
    We are fortunate to have Sappho’s thoughts on Helen at all; at the end of the 19th century a number of Greek fragments came to light in Egypt on ceramic potsherds or on tiny pieces of papyrus that had been recycled to wrap up mummies or to use as compost. Luckily a sharp labourer spread the news that he was turning up these precious scraps as he farmed his fields, and eager collectors from Europe came to gather up the slithers before they were ploughed back into the earth.
    Fragment 16, the poem to Helen, was discovered in the centre of a giant rubbish tip at a place called Oxyrhynchus (‘Town of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’), once Egypt’s third city and now the little village of Bahnasa 160 km south-west of Cairo. The morsel, which implies that Helen actively decided to leave Menelaus and elope with a lovely eastern prince, was 2.5m below the surface in a pile of decomposing manuscripts thrown away in the 5th century AD . 6
    We know that Sappho was probably a lyric poet – she composed verses to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre. The consensus is that she was a woman born some time around 630 BC , of good family, and that she came from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. It seems that she was a mother: ‘
I have a lovely child, whose form is like gold flowers
.’ Although her poems were committed to papyrus by the end of the 5th century BC , we have no way of knowing whether or not she was herself literate.
    Sappho is compelling. Even in the little we have, she speaks to usdirectly, and through her voice