Sing, Muse, of a nasty piece of work. “The face that launched a thousand ships,” wrote Marlowe — not to praise Helen of Troy’s beauty, but condemn it as the mask of a succubus. Helen is literature’s most beautiful woman and its most despised. Virgil and Euripides made the case for her execution; Ovid and Dante damned her to hell. Yeats called her the betrayer of “all living hearts”; Shakespeare, a “strumpet”; Alexander Ross, “a deform’d soul”; Rupert Brooke, “a scold . . . shrill . . . gummy-eyed and impotent”.
In classicist Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad, Helen maligns herself, too, but with a term nobody has ever used before: “dog-face”. Yes, Helen laments, she is a wretched dog-face: all the bloody years of the Trojan War are because of her abduction — or willing elopement, depending on what you believe. Either way, she’s the problem. She wishes she was dead, that the wind had whisked her off at birth and dashed her on the mountains.
Strong stuff, undermined not a little by the sheer strangeness of “dog-face”. (When the actor Tobias Menzies gave a reading of Wilson’s Iliad last October, the audience burst into laughter when he sounded the phrase.) And yet the choice proves critical to unlocking why audiences have hated Helen for centuries.
What Wilson renders as “dog-face”, past translators have interpreted more crudely. Over centuries of Iliads, Helen has described herself as a “horrid dame”, a “bold hussy”, a “nightmare of a woman”, a “slut”, a “whore”, a “bitch”, a “nasty bitch” and a “cold-blooded bitch”.
“Dog-face” is not gendered. Indeed, Achilles levies it at Agamemnon in the very beginning of the poem. And Helen is not a bitch, a slut or a whore in Wilson’s Iliad. Her translation might be the first in the English language where Helen’s femininity is not spat at. Wilson says it’s just a matter of accuracy. In the Greek, Helen calls herself a kunops, a compound word: kuōn is dog and ops is “face” or “eye”. Translating kunops as “bitch” has established for centuries of readers that Helen is despised because she is a nasty woman. The truth is less sexualised but more unfortunate for Helen: she is loathed because she has the face of a dog.
Still, seems harsh. Helen has been abducted and raped, and her author Homer does not just excoriate the victim but picks her to spit the venom. Did Homer loathe his subject? Did he compose expecting audiences to cheer for Helen’s self-flagellation?
Reading The Iliad in the present, one wonders if Helen was the Meghan Markle to Homer’s Jeremy Clarkson. Homer styles Helen as a self-pitying slut; Clarkson writes of “grinding [his] teeth and dreaming of the day when [Markle] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’” One can just as easily imagine the fiction Piers Morgan might write about Greta Thunberg, or Boris Johnson about Shamima Begum, the east London schoolgirl who married into the Islamic State in Syria and was stripped of her British citizenship as a consequence. Here in Homer’s Helen is a certain fantasy: the uncontrollable woman made to accept the blame she is due.
But blame for what? Of course, she is one of history’s great adulteresses, cuckolding Menelaus with Paris. But this wasn’t really her fault. The goddess Aphrodite awarded her to Paris; Helen had no say. Indeed, says Wilson, The Iliad is “very, very explicit that Helen doesn’t want to go with Paris, because it’s going to make her look bad. Obviously, she’s right about that.” Sappho, for one, preferred it the other way — her Helen went willingly, her cruelty lying in the abandonment of her parents and daughters — and the Elizabethans damned her immorality regardless.
By the same token, the war was not her fault either. Yet everyone blamed her for it. For the Greeks, she was an uninspiring and disastrous casus belli. In TE Lawrence’s translation of The Odyssey, the swineherd Eumaeus beats his breasts and declares to Odysseus: “I would that every one of Helen’s kind might be beaten to the knee and broken, in revenge for all the manhood she has undone.” For the Trojans, she was a plague. “With her lovely eyes she brought hellish ruin upon happy Troy,” spits Euripides’ Hecuba. Virgil depicted Helen at the fall of Troy desperate and fearful of retribution from both sides (“a thing of loathing cowering at the altar . . . this abomination”, in Robert Fagles’ translation) but also, reunited with Menelaus, gleefully mutilating her Trojan lover Deiphobus.
“We’re never given Helen’s interior monologue,” says Wilson. We never know what she actually thinks. “We’re told how she presents herself to other people.” When she bemoans herself in The Iliad, she does so to the Trojans on whom she depends for protection. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Helen forcefully, logically argues her innocence to Menelaus, who weighs whether or not to put her to the sword. “It’s clear that she’s very good at manufacturing a self-presentation that allows her to survive . . . in the world of the Homeric poems, you need to be able to do that.”
Always opaque, ever shifting, Helen is perceived more than she is understood, and she can be anything she wants except forgiven. In The Iliad she takes the blame; in Trojan Women she doesn’t. Neither approach has salvaged her reputation. In the history of literature, a character who could be positioned as anything has only ever been the bad woman, the problem. As recently as 2019, Natalie Haynes’ novel A Thousand Ships, a polyphonic, feminist account of the Trojan War, booted Helen from the cast. “She gets on my nerves,” says the narrator.
Helen knew it was always about more than adultery. “Helen of Troy is the mythical incarnation of an ancient Greek obsession: the control of female sexuality and women’s sexual power over men. As the most beautiful woman in the world, and the most destructive, she is both the most in need of control and the least controllable,” writes the classicist Ruby Blondell, author of Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation. “The war is caused not only by their inability to control the beautiful Helen but by their equal inability to dismiss or destroy her.” The irony of Helen in The Iliad, Blondell identifies, is that neither Greeks nor Trojans can devalue her — are they not both fighting for her? — so the disparagement she deserves must be placed in her own mouth. Helen retains her value by acknowledging that she has none.
The uncontrollable women, such problems still. Clarkson dreams of the punishment Markle will not self-inflict; Morgan urges King Charles to expel the “poisonous rat”. If Thunberg will not recant her beliefs, Clarkson will fantasise it: “Twenty or 30 years from now, when she needs to pick her kids up from school, and she’s got to get to the hairdressers by five, and it’s raining, she’ll leap into the Volvo just like the rest of us.” Allison Pearson upbraids Shamima Begum for showing “no remorse”; when Begum does show remorse, it does not restore her British citizenship, and Pearson does not accept it. “[She] was never British.”
The only way to win is to never have played. That’s as true in Morgan’s time (“There is no better feminist role model for [Markle] than the Queen who has spent a lifetime keeping her opinions to herself yet is the most respected woman alive”) as it was in Pericles’ (“The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.”)
There is no escape from this kind of hate and, for Helen, this is what being dog-faced is all about. “That it is not the woman or goddess herself, but her face, that is like a dog suggests that it might be male perceptions of women, rather than female desires themselves, that threaten the social fabric,” writes Wilson in her notes on The Odyssey. Homer takes pains to show that Helen is possessed of extraordinary perception. In Troy, she sees through Odysseus’s disguise; in Sparta, she recognises an adult Telemachus having only ever met him as a baby. One of her narrative functions in The Iliad is to identify the Greek heroes for the audience. Of herself, she perceives, correctly, that she is trapped. She is not on trial for adultery. She knows that no matter what she does and says, she will be reviled. Such is the curse of the dog-faced, so that is what she calls herself.
“There’s something negative about being a dog-face or having a dog-face, but then what kind of negative is it? Helen doesn’t actually say, ‘I had agency in this decision and I feel bad about what I chose to do.’ Instead, she says, ‘Everyone shudders at me and people don’t want to be around me,’” says Wilson. “Is she even saying something bad about herself? If you translate it into some sexualised self-blame, it becomes unambiguous, and I think the original is really ambiguous. What does it mean to be a dog-face? Euripides uses that term for the Furies, who aren’t presented as morally bad, they’re presented as scary, and they’re scary if you’ve done something bad. Helen, as the daughter of Nemesis as well as Zeus, has the scariness that she causes trouble but it’s not necessarily because she’s an evil person. It might be because that’s her place in the narrative, and she’s very aware of that.”
This, then, is the Helen of Wilson’s Iliad, which may well be the same as the Helen of Homer’s Iliad. “I want the reader to understand that she’s very smart,” she says. “We get to see how Helen is manipulating her story. Even if she doesn’t have control over where she is physically, she has control over what words she puts out around it, and that is a real power.” Wilson has restored to Helen that power.
Helen wanted us to know she had the face of a dog, every translator that chose “bitch” overwrote her. Helen does not think she is a strumpet; other people have called her that.
Homer’s Helen understands her role in The Iliad, and the war, and extrapolates that to an identity that extends into eternity. She is to be reviled, then and now, by Menelaus and Marlowe. One cannot help but hate her. To look at her is to see extraordinary beauty, but to be repelled by it; to hate something in her face and never shake it. She represents something beyond humanity and, of course, she’s not human. She is a mythological red mist, who can see but never herself be seen, after which men will, for thousands of years, send a thousand angry ships or a thousand spiteful pages without ever really knowing why.
Duncan Fyfe is a writer and author of the history podcast “Something True”
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