All About a Face That Launched 1000 Ships
…And a Book That Launched 1000 Rabbit Trails…
Fall of 2025 has been the semester in which my 9th grader has been reading the complete and unabridged Iliad for the first time. We have read picture books, chapter books, and abridged works over the years (Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy, beautifully illustrated by Alan Lee, was probably my favorite), but now we’re nearly in the big leagues (the real big leagues would be reading it in Greek, maybe one day…).
I have maintained my habit of reading something new alongside teaching something old to me over the years, and while re-reading Homer’s Iliad (and listening to the Ascend podcast episodes with the kiddo) I decided to meander through Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore by Bettany Hughes. Meander is the most appropriate word because, like my blog, Hughes’s work frolics about joyfully and a little chaotically. It’s entertaining though repetitive, it’s amusing and long-winded.
Czarney Pies, a Goodreads user, reviewed:
“Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore” is a scatter-gun, scatter-brained work that is nonetheless highly entertaining. Reading it is something like inviting your friends from your undergraduate years over for dinner, plying them generously with alcohol and letting them rant on about whatever literary or artistic idea comes into their minds. History students will express themselves on Beethoven. English lit graduates will give you their opinions on Rabelais while philosophy students will tell you what they think the Federal Reserve Board should do about interest rates. The cacophony is as joyous as it is incoherent. As Hughes herself notes at one point that she may be presenting “a mangle of literary and social references (with a sprinkling of fanstasy [sic]) rather than historical fact.” (pp. 285- 286)
Quite frankly, that is the best description of Hughes’s work that could ever exist, in my opinion. I love this paragraph from Czarney Pies’s review so much I copied it –TWICE– into my commonplace journal. (I didn’t realize I was copying it for a second time until I was halfway through doing it and had a déjà vu moment.)
Pies makes you want to go to that party, and Hughes takes you there. Whether she intended it or not, her Helen magnum opus would be served best over a bottle of wine and a group of chatty nerds. While reading I found myself looking up a lot of paintings I had never seen and re-reading plays I hadn’t touched in decades.
My first rabbit trail was a quote on the top of page eight from Euripides, and I immediately stopped and read Medea and Other Plays from the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series. Translated by James Morwood, the collection highlights the flaws and follies of Grecian women in mythology and includes the plays Medea, Hippolytus, Elektra, and of course, Helen. I had read Medea before and knew about the Lilith/Lamia fashioned child-killer, but Euripides’s depiction of Helen of Troy was new to me. In this version, the adulteress of Troy is presented as a more palatable character who was squirreled away in Egypt for an entire decade long war and was never with Paris at all. The Helen we see in Troy was a phantom Helen created by the gods, and is a victim of circumstance.
Hughes pulls out every myth, legend, play, painting, poem, and tapestry ever known throughout history and discusses them thoroughly. She talks about the things most culturally literate people know off hand and things that only die-hard ancient literature or history buffs have researched. Sometimes treating Helen like a real person, the book takes on a biographical form. Sometimes Hughes detours into fictional fandom and muses on possibilities with whimsy. At all times I can picture Pies’s fictional party spitballing ideas about Helen of Troy, gossiping like pick-a-little-ladies and debating like Mensa meeting attendees.
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Anakalian Whims 