The mythological Trojan War was fought between a large expedition of loosely allied Greek kingdoms from around the Aegean on one side, and the wealthy city of Troy, located on the northeast coast of the Aegean, with its Near Eastern allies on the other side. See the inset map for reference to the various kingdoms and places mentioned in this essay.
The war was fought during the end of what Hesiod referred to as the Heroic Age, a time in the mythical past in which Zeus and the other gods mingled with mortal men and women to create generations of humans with divine bloodlines. The war was waged during the last, or nearly the last, generation of the age. Heroes such as Perseus, Bellerophon, Jason, Herakles, Theseus, Oedipus, etc. were dead and gone by the outbreak of the war. Yet at least one more generation of demi-gods remained, notably such heroes as Achilles, Sarpedon, Memnon, Aeneas, et al.
Map of Homeric Greece with English labels
by Pinpin. CC BY-SA 3.0. Click to enlarge.
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The immediate cause of the Trojan War was the Rape of Helen by the Trojan prince, Paris (sometimes called Alexander). The war was fought both to return Helen to her lawful Greek husband, Menelaus, and to punish the Trojans for harboring Paris and refusing to turn over Helen to Menelaus and his fellow Greeks. The mythological story behind the Rape of Helen, however, finds its origins in two similar stories involving the gods: the Seduction of Leda and the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. These two events resulted in the Judgement of Paris, which led directly into the so-called Rape of Helen. These three stories are rife with the magic and intrigue that Greek myths are famous for, and there are numerous surviving versions of the stories, both in textual form as well as narrative art from the Greco-Roman world. These three interrelated stories will be our focus for the remainder of this essay.
Seduction tales are some of the most common and fantastical of Greek myths, no doubt due to their reliance on miraculous transformations. Indeed, the Roman poet, Ovid, composed an epic centered around fantastical transformation, called the Metamorphoses , and it remains one of the most influential (and continually re-translated) works of art from the Greco-Roman world. According to the Library of Apollodorus, "Zeus, in the form of a swan, slept with Leda, and on the same night Tyndareus also slept with her. Zeus fathered Polydeuces and Helen; Tyndareos fathered Castor and Clytemnestra."[1] The seduction of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan is a popular visual. Examples survive from the Classical Greek to Imperial Roman periods:
The following works are pictured below:
The Library of Apollodorus includes two stories for the seduction of Leda. The one relayed above is perhaps more popular, but the other mentions a feature that doesn't occur in the former. In the alternate version, it was not Leda whom Zeus seduced in the form of a swan, but Nemesis, the goddess of just retribution. "[F]or when Nemesis was trying to avoid intercourse with Zeus, she changed her form into that of a goose, and he turned himself into a swan and slept with her. From their intercourse she laid an egg, which some shepherd discovered in the marshes and gave to Leda, who put it into a chest and kept it. When the time came and Helen was born, she raised her as her own daughter."[2] This second story offers a clearer rationalization for the popular story of Helen born from an egg. Whether the egg came from Leda or Nemesis, however, is unclear in many cases on the visual record. Both stories involve a certain poetic irony. In the second version, the fact that Helen is truly the daughter of Nemesis comes full circle when the Greeks set sail against Troy to punish Paris and the Trojans in an act of "just retribution" for having stolen Helen from her lawfully wedded Greek husband. More on that punishment later.
The birth of Helen from an egg on an altar of Zeus. Leda is on the left. A shepherd with a stick stands on the right. The god Eros hovers above with a wreath in hand. Kiel B 501 Photo: Marcus Cyron (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Although not always present, the majority of surviving visual narratives of the egg also include an altar of Zeus. In fact, Tyndareus is completely absent from the following scene, but the artist was sure to include the altar of Zeus.
Thetis was a sea nymph, a Nereid (daughter of the sea god, Nereus, also called the Old Man of the Sea). Thetis' story is similar to that of Metis ("Cunning Intelligence"), who was also a sea nymph, an Oceanid (daughter of the titans Okeanos and Tethys). We will first review the story of Metis and then return to that of Thetis and Peleus.
Metis was, like Thetis, an object of affection for Zeus. In fact, Hesiod names her the first wife of Zeus:
Now king of the gods, Zeus made Metis his first wife,
Wiser than any other god, or any mortal man.
But when she was about to deliver the owl-eyed goddess
Athena, Zeus tricked her, gulled her with crafty words,
And stuffed her in his stomach, taking the advice
Of Gaia [Earth] and Ouranos [Sky/Heaven]. They told him to do this
So that no one but Zeus would hold the title of King
Among the eternal gods, for it was predestined
That very wise children would be born from Metis,
First the grey-eyed girl Tritogeneia [Athena],
Equal to her father in strength and wisdom,
But then a son with an arrogant heart
Who would one day be king of gods and men.
But Zeus stuffed the goddess into his stomach first
So she would devise with him good and evil both. [3]
In this Theogony, Metis is the object of affection for Zeus, but he encounters a prophecy alerting him to the danger of intercourse with her. Zeus adjusts his behavior accordingly to avoid the potential disaster of the prophecy by restraining his own sexual desires and, instead, turns that potential misstep into a strength. Rather than siring an "arrogant" son who would overthrow him, Zeus took Metis into his "stomach," merging with the incarnation of "cunning intelligence" to increase his own cunning and ensure that Metis would give birth to no children who could threaten his rule. Let us now turn to the story of Thetis and Peleus and see how the two compare.
Theogony mentions only that Thetis was "mastered" by Peleus, but before that, there was the question of which god might win Thetis to his bed. According to the Library of Apollodorus,
[Peleus] married Thetis daughter of Nereus. Zeus and Poseidon were rivals for her hand, but when Themis prophesied that the son born from her would be greater than his father, they gave up. Some say, however, that when Zeus was on his way to sleep with her, Prometheus told him that the son born to him from her would become king of heaven. And some say that Thetis did not want to sleep with Zeus because she had been raised by Hera, so Zeus got angry and wanted to marry her off to a mortal. [4]
By way of Apollodorus, alone, three different tales of Thetis as object of affection survive. Two of them are quite similar: an oracular god (either Themis or Prometheus) prophesize that the Thetis' son will be greater than his father or, in the case of Zeus, usurp his place on Olympos. The third tale is quite unlike the others, both in that Zeus seeks to punish Thetis, but also in that Thetis is an ally of Hera, which would seem out of character given other myths of Thetis in which the sea goddess aides or adopts children (Hephaistos) and stepchildren (Dionysos) of Hera whom the queen of the gods would seem to have forsaken. Nevertheless, there are versions of the Hephaistos myth in which the crippled god is thrown off of Olympos by Zeus while attempting to shield Hera from Zeus' wrath. So at the end of the day, our expectations for unity of purpose and theme between iterations of a myth must remain elastic. In any case, there is a clear parallel in the myth of Metis in Theogony and that of the first two versions told by Apollodorus. Zeus (or Zeus and Poseidon) avert the potential disaster of a serious threat to their control over the cosmos by avoiding intercourse with Thetis. By marrying Thetis to Peleus, Zeus ties Thetis' son to mortality, so that no matter how much greater that child is than his father (Peleus), he will be mortal and, thus, no threat to the established hierarchy on Olympos.
The relationship between Thetis and Peleus is somewhat strange. The seduction scene is popular enough from the Classical period onward in Greco-Roman art as to have been canonized by that time, but the story itself is sometimes difficult for students to digest. We will follow Apollodorus' summary again before reviewing some of the surviving narrative art:
Cheiron advised Peleus to grab [Thetis] and hold on tight to her as she changed shapes. Peleus lay in wait for her, grabbed her, and held on. She turned into fire, then water, then a wild animal, but he did not let go until he saw that she had regained her original form. He married her on Mount Pelion. [5]
Cheiron is an enigmatic figure in Greek myth. He is a centaur (half man and half horse) and the only centaur regularly depicted as being civilized, often visualized wearing clothes to distinguish him from his barbarous cousins. In some myths, Cheiron is also an immortal centaur (having given up his immortality willingly for various reasons). Regardless of the centaur's mortality, he is widely remembered as a benefactor of heroes, having mentored Asklepios, Aristaios, Aktaion, Jason and Achilles. There are multiple stories of Cheiron rescuing heroes, such as Peleus, from the savagery of his fellow centaurs. His appearance in the visual record is most notably as a friend to Peleus and mentor to his son, Achilles.
There are a slew of magnificent examples in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Louvre, which have slightly more difficult copyright:
Louvre G186 - Peleus hands Achilles over to Cheiron. Attic red-figure stamnos attributed to the Berlin Painter (c. 500-480 BCE).
Boston 1972.850 - Peleus grasps Thetis while Nereids run about. Cheiron looks on from the side. Attic red-figure kalyx krater (c. 460-450 BCE).
Louvre Cp 561 - Cheiron contemplates the young Achilles in his hand. Attic red-figure neck-amphora (c. 525-515 BCE).
Attic black-figure neck-amphora (c. 520 BCE). Walters 48.18. Peleus hands over the child Achilles to be tutored by Cheiron, the wise centaur who is fully clothed.
Imperial Roman intaglio inset gold ring (2nd-1st century BCE). Walters 42.1161. Cheiron teaching young Achilles to play the lyre.
Detail of Attic red-figure volute krater attributed to Kleophrades Painter (c. 500-480). Getty 77.AE.11. Cheiron is shown at center with part of his face missing. All but Peleus' lower leg and face are missing as he clings to Thetis' midsection.
Detail of Sophilos Dinos, Attic black-figure dinos attributed to Sophilos (c. 580-570 BCE). London 1961.11.01.1. The gods coming to the palace of Peleus to celebrate his wedding to Thetis, all inscribed with names. Photo: ArchaiOptix (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Heeding Cheiron's sage advice, Peleus held tightly to Thetis whilst she transformed into all manner of beasts in an attempt to scare him away. This is one of those points where a student might ask how is it that a goddess cannot overpower a mere mortal? After all, Peleus is not the superhuman Herakles grasping onto Nereus until the old god submits. The answer is that...there is no "good" answer to the question. Modern students are not the first to attempt to rationalize myths in this way. Hellenistic and Roman scholars wrote treatises trying to reinterpret/rationalize myths. I think the question we ought to concern ourselves with is what are the implications of this story? Why arrange the tale so that Peleus is able to maintain his grasp of Thetis? One answer is that the pair must wed together by the end of the story in order to produce Achilles, which is akin to saying, "because the show must go on!" There are, of course, other ways this "seduction scene" could have played out.
If we take a brief detour to examine the Long Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, we find a similar situation. Aphrodite, in love with a mortal, seduces him in the guise of a maiden, gives birth to a mortal child, and leaves the child with his mortal father to raise. In the hymn, Aphrodite takes an active role in seducing her lover, Anchises. Yet when she achieves the goal of her deceit and welcomes Anchises into her bed, she does so in tears. These tears, we soon learn, are not of joy but dread. This feeling of dread in Aphrodite is so great that she names her newly conceived son Aineias, after the Greek word for dread (ainos). The child, Aineias (or Aeneas in its more common Latinized form), is the living embodiment of Aphrodite's dread sorrow. She is a goddess in love with a mortal. Worse, she has given birth to a mortal child, both of whom she must watch grow old and die. These are not natural psychological or emotional experiences for a god. On the other hand, these are the very definition of what it means to be human in Greek myths: we humans grow old and die in juxtaposition to the gods who remain ageless and immortal.
To return to the question about why Thetis does not wish to marry or take Peleus as a lover, the answer seems obvious: he is mortal. To make a family with him is to invest psychologically and emotionally in a lover and child who will grow old and die in what, to her, is the blink of an eye. Yet if Thetis cares for Peleus, she wouldn't do him harm. Meanwhile, Peleus' act of grasping onto Thetis functions as a rite of passage, proving that the mortal is brave and worthy of his role as lover to a goddess. In any case, depictions of Peleus clinging to Thetis were popular as early as the late Archaic period and persisted well into the Imperial Roman period as most seduction- and transformation- scenes were popular in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Links to a selection of images in the Louvre:
Louvre MN 1532 - Attic black-figure hydria (c. 520-510 BCE)
Louvre LP 1435 - Attic red-figure hydria (c. 480-470 BCE)
Louvre G 178 - Attic red-figure hydria (c. 480-470 BCE)
Louvre F 452 - Attic black-figure lekythos (c. 500-475 BCE)
Louvre CA 2569 - Boiotian black-figure plate (c. 500-475 BCE)
The wedding of Peleus and Thetis was memorable as much for who was not invited as for who attended it. The basics of the story seem to have been established by the late Archaic period as evidenced by the Sophilos Dinos and Francois Vase (inset below). Both vases are examples of early 6th Century black-figure narrative art that depict the procession of gods to the palace of Peleus in order to celebrate his wedding to Thetis. All of the major Olympian gods, as well as others in good standing (i.e., not trapped in Tartaros!) were in attendance for the festive event. All except Eris, the incarnation of Strife, that is. She alone was not invited to the wedding. On the one hand, her omission makes sense. What newlyweds would want strife at their wedding? On the other hand, shaming Eris by making her the only god conspicuously not invited, as it turns out, was a good way to ensure strife at the wedding.
So it was that Eris devised a way to bring strife to the wedding: she crafted a golden apple and inscribed on it "to the most beautiful" (or "to the fairest of them all" if you want to flaunt that dramatic license). The apple rolled to the feet of the gods Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, each of whom claimed it for herself. Unable to decide to whom the apple rightfully belonged, they took their dispute to Zeus, the arbiter of justice and order in the cosmos. Zeus then put the apple in the hands of his herald and son, Hermes, ordering him to bring and the goddesses to a mortal shepherding his flock on the foothills of Mt. Ida in Asia Minor. There Hermes would give the apple to the shepherd, and the mortal would judge which goddess should receive it.
Left: Attic black-figure volute krater by Kleitias (c. 570 BCE). Museo Archeologico Etrusco 4209 Photo: Saiko (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Right: Attic black-figure dinos attributed to Sophilos (c. 580-570 BCE). British Museum 1971.1101.1. Photo: ArchaiOptix (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The state of preservation for the Sophilos Dinos (right) is significantly better than that of the Francois Vase (left), but they are nevertheless quite similar in their depiction of the wedding procession. At the far right of both processions (the top register on the body/shoulder of both vases), Peleus stands facing the procession with his back to a columned structure, representing his palace. He is in a position to greet his guests, holding a kantharos (wine cup) in one painting and standing with his hand raised in salutation in the other. The various gods are more difficult to identify individually, but in both paintings, the processions are led by a goddess holding a kerykeion (herald's staff). That would be Iris, the female messenger of the gods. Her male counterpart, Hermes, is further back on both vases driving a chariot (not pictured). The centaur Cheiron is easily recognizable in both processions thanks to his distinctive anatomy and carrying a few hares/deer tied to a stick over his shoulder. The wine god Dionysos is among the forward members of the processions as well, recognizable by his distinctive grape vine (he is painted en face on the Francois Vase, which is unusual for the medium). All of the figures in the procession are named, but I have only reviewed the ones with clear attributes for the layperson to recognize. As is common in black-figure, female flesh is painted white while male flesh remains black.
The shepherd to whom Zeus directed Hermes, with the golden apple and three goddesses in tow, was none other than the Trojan Prince Paris or Alexandros. How was it that Paris, a prince of Troy, found himself looking after sheep in the hinterlands of Troy? The story according to Apollodorus is thus:
When Hecabe [queen of Troy] was about to have her second child, she had a vision in her sleep that she had given birth to a fiery torch and that it was spreading through and burning the whole city. When Priam [king of Troy] learned of the dream from Hecabe, he summoned his son Aisacos, for he was a dream-interpreter who had been taught by his maternal grandfather, Merops. He said that their son would prove to be the destruction of his homeland and urged that the infant be exposed. When the baby was born, Priam gave it to a slave to take to Mount Ida and expose [it]. The slave was named Agelaos. The infant exposed by him was nourished for five days by a bear. Finding it still alive, Agelaos picked it up, took it, and raised it on his farm as his own son, naming him Paris. Paris grew into a young man who was both more beautiful and stronger than most, and he received the second name Alexander because he kept away bandits and defended the herds. Not much later he found his parents. [6]
There are other versions and explanations for the two names, but the gist is the same: Paris was prophesized to be the destruction of Troy. His parents made the decision to expose him, and rather than die to exposure, he ends up adopted by a commoner or someone outside the circle of the palace life, and the baby grows into a man unaware of his true identity. This template, with slight alterations, is a stock plot device in heroic sagas, most notably Oedipus; Perseus; and Romulus and Remus.
Thus Paris, the as-yet unclaimed prince of Troy, was minding his business shepherding the flocks of his adoptive father on the foothills of Mt. Ida when Hermes appeared before him bearing a golden apple and three very beautiful and very determined goddesses. Scenes depicting the Judgment of Paris, as this event is called, are popular in red-figure (very late Archaic) through Imperial Roman art. Scenes of Hermes leading the goddesses to Paris proliferate even earlier in 6th century black-figure painting. See the Judgment of Paris in Ancient Art gallery (below) for a brief survey of surviving examples.
The actual judgment involved in the Judgment of Paris was something akin to a corrupt beauty pageant wherein the contestants ply the judges with gifts and bribes for their votes. But that view of events is somewhat skewed and heavily laden with modern prejudices. Perhaps a better way to view the events is to rationalize them (ever a danger when dealing with myths). Gods are gods. They don't look like anything. They can look like everything. If Paris were to compare the beauty of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera in an appraisal of their visual appeal, then there would be no basis for comparison. Gods can appear before humans in any guise they choose. Rather, what set the three goddesses apart was their fundamental difference in the Greek psyche: what were the signature aspects of the gods? It is through the gifts (or "bribes") they offer to Paris that these fundamental aspects of their respective beings are crystalized by the myth. Athena, the warrior child of Zeus and helper of heroes, offered Paris victory in battle. Hera, the queen of the gods, offered Paris wealth and rule over all of Asia. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, offered Paris the woman of his dreams - who happened to already be married, but that's a story for the next chapter! Thus did Aphrodite win the contest.
It is difficult to not judge Paris for his decision in this myth. Indeed, it is quite difficult to avoid judging Paris throughout the extant myths. His character is constantly criticized in the Iliad, and it is almost impossible to avoid blaming him for sparking the Trojan War due to a weakness of moral character, seducing another man's wife, or an inability to master his carnal desires. Yet this line of thinking overlooks a core theme in this myth, and others, in the klea andron (fames of men): humans are born to suffer. We lack the power and knowledge (and immortality) to match wits with the gods. The fact of the matter is that Paris was doomed (fated!) to err. There was no "correct" answer or way out of his doom, once selected by Zeus to judge the contest between three gods. He was always ever going to earn the patronage of one god, and the enmity of the two he scorned simply by not selecting them (plural) as the one (singular). So let us not judge Paris too harshly in this matter. For he represents all humanity in this myth, and to err, after all, is human. However, to forgive is not exactly divine...at least not in Greek myths.
Helen's beauty was a curse to her (and her family) long before the Trojan War. In her youth (her actual age is uncertain other than being prepubescent), Helen was kidnapped by Theseus. Then lord of Athens, the bold hero sought to join his household to that of Zeus by way of marriage to Helen, Zeus' mortal daughter. Alas, Helen was still too young to wed (and consummate the marriage). So Theseus left her behind in his palace, and set off for the underworld in the misguided hope of helping his companion, Pirithous, rape Persephone, queen of the underworld and bride of Hades. Needless to say, the pair failed in their endeavor and found themselves trapped in the underworld. While Theseus was restrained in the underworld, Helen's brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, led an expedition to Athens and rescued her. This event, however, served as notice that Helen's beauty was a dangerous attribute that would make her forever the object of desire for powerful men.
Thus was the bind in which Tyndareus, Helen's mortal father and patriarch, found himself when Helen came of marriageable age. How could he arrange any marriage that would prevent another powerful lord from acting on his desire and taking her by force from her chosen husband? In stepped Odysseus, the king of Ithaca who was, himself, in search of a bride. The pair struck a deal. Odysseus, renowned for his clever mind, offered a solution to Tyndareus' dilemma if the latter would aide him in wooing Tyndareus' niece, Penelope. Tyndareus agreed. Odysseus proposed the simple solution that all of the suitors for Helen's hand in marriage pledge a pact to defend the right to Helen's hand of whomever is chosen to be her legally wedded husband. In other words, they all agreed to defend the right of Helen's hand in marriage, so if one lord sought to steal her away, as Theseus had done, then not only would her husband pursue him, but all of the Greek kings who made this pact would pursue him. Tyndareus awarded Helen's hand in Marriage to Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and all the other Greek kingdoms were thus sworn to defend his right to Helen.
Years later, Paris (a recognized prince of Troy by this time), traveled to mainland Greece and stayed in Sparta as a guest-friend under the law of xenia to Menelaus. Xenia is the Greek concept of hospitality in which travelers or strangers are welcomed as guests, given feasts, clothing, a bed, treated as family and given a gift. The practice of xenia occurs at some point in almost every Greek myth involving humans, either for its observance or its violation. In the story of Helen, it is most definitely a violation. While in the palace of Menelaus, Paris violated the sacred law of xenia and stole Helen away from Menelaus. This act was the culmination of many other episodes, beginning with the seduction of Leda and marriage of Thetis and Peleus. It was the touchstone upon which the Trojan War sparked. For most of the Greek kings were sworn to defend Menelaus' right to Helen because of their pact years earlier when Tyndareus chose her husband. Agamemnon, leader of the most powerful Greek kingdom, was honor bound to restore Helen to Menelaus because Menelaus was his his younger brother. Still other, younger Greek lords were drawn into the expedition for the honor and fame one could gain in such a storied battle. Xenia served as further compulsion for Greeks to join the campaign against Troy. For xenia was sacred to none other than Zeus himself, Zeus of Guest-Friendship (Zeus Xenios). The campaign to restore Helen was thus framed as a war to mete out the justice of Zeus upon Paris, the violator of xenia, and Troy, the city that harbored him.
Ancient descriptions and surviving visual narratives of Helen's departure from the house of Menelaus in Sparta to that of Paris in Troy treat the action as a willful choice on the part of Helen. She is regularly portrayed as being wooed and persuaded by Paris who is aided by various gods. She is not, to my knowledge, depicted as being carried away against her will the way Persephone is carried away by Hades in a Macedonian tomb fresco. Given the variety of sources on the seduction and abduction of Helen by Paris in Greco-Roman myths, there were certainly some such depictions. Yet it is only with later artists and the modern imagination (perhaps Renaissance, certainly Neoclassicist) that we see Helen ripped violently away from her home in Sparta. There is an irony in this relative lack of evidence. We need look no farther afield than the Iliad, the most popular single work of Greek myth, in order to find ample evidence of women captured, dragged from their families, and exchanged as objects or trophies. All of this is to say that there was ample opportunity and a cultural disposition to treating women as objects, victims, or simply without agency in Greek myth. Helen's decision to leave Menelaus for Paris was not, generally speaking, treated as one of these violent thefts or rapes. The myths, including the Iliad, treat it as a mortal's, albeit her emotions were influenced by gods.
[1] R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma. Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Hackett (2007).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hesiod. Theogony. In Hesiod: Works and Days, and Theogony. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett (1993).
[4] R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma. Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Hackett (2007).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
