4.219–264

Menelaus has decided that they will talk no more for the moment about the Trojan War and its sorrows, turning their attention to dinner with the prospect of resuming that conversation tomorrow morning. Helen has other ideas (219), drugging the dinner wine and pulling the guests—and us—back toward the past. As she tells her story, a different Odysseus emerges from the steadfast, loyal friend and fighter we have seen through the eyes of Nestor and Menelaus, crafty, deceptive, and illusive, penetrating the enemy’s city in disguise. This is the figure we will encounter, with a few exceptions, for the rest of the poem.

Helen’s drug turns the diners into a willing audience for her story. She will not, she says, try to recount all the trials and suffering the Greeks underwent at Troy. Instead, she offers a brief but portentous vignette. She found Odysseus skulking around Troy, having disguised himself as a beggar, gathering intelligence on the Trojans in preparation for the Greeks’ conquest of the city. This persona and mission foreshadow his eventual reentry into Ithaka precisely, another model for the poet to build on. Helen, meanwhile, continues in her story to embody characteristics that will recur in several figures through the course of the poem, seductive, with power beyond the control of mortal men, a frightening specter in a patriarchal culture. She is the poem’s first example of the “detaining woman,” who wants to hold on to the hero and keep him from completing his journey. Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens are clear parallels, but the paradigm encompasses other less obvious examples of the type. Nausicaa, an innocent virgin dreaming of marriage who encounters Odysseus when he washes ashore on the island of the Phaeacians, is just as threatening to his mission. He first appears to the young princess in an even more vulnerable state than the beggar at Troy, exhausted and covered with brine after seven days at sea, entirely naked (6.127–38). When she offers to have her handmaidens bathe him, the scruffy sailor demurs, saying he would be embarrassed to appear naked before the young girls. His reticence is proper and reasonable in the situation, but the decision also reflects other levels of meaning in the story.

Being bathed by women can make a man vulnerable in the Odyssey. Water itself is “feminine” in the Greeks gendered division of the world, amorphous, flowing across the clean edges that define things masculine. This perspective clearly informs the alternating sequence of events that immediately precede the meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa on the beach at Scheria. Odysseus has just escaped from Calypso’s island, an eminently feminine place outside time and change. His vehicle for the journey is a boat he builds himself out of lumber on the island, measuring, cutting, joining, to create a product of masculine civilization from nature. Once launched, he is soon dunked in the amorphous sea when Poseidon sends a storm to wreck his boat. Having emerged from a primal baptism in the waves, he crawls naked onto the shore where he meets the young princess (5.235–493). We are perhaps not surprised to find him wary of another submersion. After he returns in disguise to Ithaka, he has one more close call, when his identity is nearly revealed prematurely after his childhood nurse Eurykleia recognizes an old scar while washing his feet (19.467–90; see essay on 4.100–46). When Helen questioned the beggar in Troy, he at first tried to avoid answering, but then:

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δή μιν ἐγὼ λόεον καὶ χρῖον ἐλαίῳ,
ἀμφὶ δὲ εἵματα ἕσσα καὶ ὤμοσα καρτερὸν ὅρκον
μὴ μὲν πρὶν Ὀδυσῆα μετὰ Τρώεσσ᾽ ἀναφῆναι,
πρίν γε τὸν ἐς νῆάς τε θοὰς κλισίας τ᾽ ἀφικέσθαι,
καὶ τότε δή μοι πάντα νόον κατέλεξεν Ἀχαιῶν.
πολλοὺς δὲ Τρώων κτείνας ταναήκεϊ χαλκῷ
ἦλθε μετ᾽ Ἀργείους, κατὰ δὲ φρόνιν ἤγαγε πολλήν.

When I bathed him and anointed him with olive oil
and wrapped him in clothing and swore a powerful oath
not to reveal him as Odysseus before the Trojans
until he arrived back at the swift ships and shelters,
then he told me all the plans of the Achaeans.
And after killing many Trojans with his sharp-edged bronze,
he returned to the Argives and brought back much information.

Odyssey 4.452–68

After bathing him, Helen managed to get Odysseus to reveal his identity, something no one else could do until Penelope tricks him at the end of the poem (23.174–204). His insistence on an oath foreshadows the moment when he extracts similar concessions from Calypso and Circe, females with supernatural powers (5.174–204; 10.337–43). The import of Helen’s little story, for those at the dinner and for us, is that she wields extraordinary power, a legacy from her patron goddess, Aphrodite.  

But just as we absorb that lesson, the poet adds another layer to the queen’s complex persona. The power comes at a cost:

ἔνθ᾽ ἄλλαι Τρῳαὶ λίγ᾽ ἐκώκυον: αὐτὰρ ἐμὸν κῆρ
χαῖρ᾽, ἐπεὶ ἤδη μοι κραδίη τέτραπτο νέεσθαι
ἂψ οἶκόνδ᾽, ἄτην δὲ μετέστενον, ἣν Ἀφροδίτη
δῶχ᾽, ὅτε μ᾽ ἤγαγε κεῖσε φίλης ἀπὸ πατρίδος αἴης,
παῖδά τ᾽ ἐμὴν νοσφισσαμένην θάλαμόν τε πόσιν τε
οὔ τευ δευόμενον, οὔτ᾽ ἂρ φρένας οὔτε τι εἶδος.

Then the other Trojan women gave a shrill cry, but
my heart rejoiced, since my heart had turned back
homeward, and I grieved for that madness that Aphrodite
gave me, when she led me there, away from my fatherland,
apart from my child and my bedroom and my husband,
who lacked neither intelligence nor beauty.

Odyssey 4.259–64

The complexity of Helen’s character raises questions that Homer declines to answer. Set apart from other mortals by her numinous beauty, she is also subject to the shame and self-doubt that trouble us all. It doesn’t suit the poet to settle the question of Helen’s ultimate responsibility for leaving her husband: Did Aphrodite force the issue or only stir up emotions already present? Rather, we are invited to contemplate the impact of her actions, on herself and her family.

Further Reading

Carson, A. “Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire." In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient World, ed. D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin, 135–169. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 27, 30, 101. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wohl, V. 1993. “Standing by the Stathmos: The Creation of Sexual Ideology in the Odyssey. Arethusa 26: 33–36; 44.