Love Conquers Nothing

  I am sure that Hector knew how Helen felt about him. He may have agreed, secretly, that he should have been her husband. He, above all Priam’s other sons, knew how weak Paris really was; many a time he must have pitied Helen. We know that he was very decent to her, though there was never a breath of scandal against those two. There would have been no reason for scandal; Hector was always a gentleman. Besides, Andromache suited him. It was only that he would have pitied any woman Paris married.

  Considering everything, her chagrin, her disappointment, her suppressed admiration for Hector and all the rest of it, Helen behaved remarkably well in Troy. Priam’s women never had cause to complain of her manners. She was a well-bred woman, and had learned patience in a hard school. Besides, it must have been some alleviation to her boredom to know that for nine long years the Achaeans besieged the city of Troy, ostensibly on her account, though according to my ideas the abduction of Helen was only a small match flame to a fuse that set off the big fireworks. I think that the Achaeans, with the exception of Menelaus, would never have fought so long merely for a woman, and she another man’s wife they’d never even have a chance to abduct. No, they fought first in hopes of sacking the rich town of Troy, and later because they would have looked very silly if they had stopped. Then there were all kinds of private feuds mixed up in the affair, and they grew in importance as time lengthened, until every single officer’s honor was somehow bound up in the siege. The war became a habit, and Helen, the original cause, was nearly forgotten.

  Even Menelaus must have had to remind himself sometimes that he was a cuckold and that his honor demanded repair. Never for a moment did he lose sight of his dearest wish, to carve the heart out of Paris, but it was only to be expected that his mind should dwell more on that satisfaction than on the loss of a wife. Also he probably thought of his property, his wealth, now dispersed among the tall pillars of Paris’s house, and then he would grind his teeth and look forward to getting it all back with interest. But to think of the siege of Troy as a clear-cut example of a love battle is, I am sure, a gross oversimplification, and equally gross flattery of Helen.

  Fortunately for her spirits, that lady did not have to remain cloistered and immobile for the duration. The cold war waxed hot at last, Menelaus sensibly suggesting a private duel between Paris and himself, and pledging that he would stand by the result, whatever the outcome. But Helen’s bad luck in marriage continued. She was invited to the Scaean Gate to witness the encounter, and she went forthwith, tears of homesickness running down her cheeks. It would have been far better for her pride not to be in the public eye at that particular time, for, ultimately, Paris did not show up well.

  It began in an orderly manner enough. After a considerable amount of palaver and ceremonial sacrifice, for the ancients were a talkative people and the gods resented the slightest neglect, the duel began. Paris won the toss as to who should have first chance to throw his spear, but Menelaus parried the blow with his shield. The King’s spear had more effect; it came very close to killing, but Paris swerved and saved himself. Menelaus’s sword broke on Paris’s helmet, and then, mad with rage, the wronged husband leaped at his rival, seized him by the crest of his helmet, and started to drag him back to the Achaean lines. “Paris was choked by the pressure on his tender throat of the embroidered helmet-strap,” and Helen would have seen the end of her pretty lover then and there if Aphrodite, with her customary unscrupulousness, had not broken the strap and whisked him off, wrapped in a dense mist. She put him down in his own perfumed bedroom and went back to Helen, who was still sitting over the Scaean Gate, trying not to betray her humiliation and fury.

  “Come!” Aphrodite said. “Paris wants you to go home to him. There he is in his room, on the inlaid bed, radiant in his beauty and his lovely clothes. You would never believe that he had just come in from a duel. You would think he was going to a dance or had just stopped dancing and sat down to rest.”

  If Helen was irritated, one can well understand and sympathize. There she sat, bitterly absorbed in homesick remorse, and as if that were not bad enough, she had to swallow the unpalatable fact that Menelaus, her despised and discarded husband, had just proved himself a far better man than Paris, whose property she had become. Hardly a tactful moment, one would say, to suggest amorous dalliance with that same Paris. Helen lost her temper.

  It was not often that any goddess received the tongue-lashing she now gave Aphrodite. All her frustration and shame came pouring out in hot words. Perversely, she gloried that Menelaus was evidently still interested in her and would be willing to take her home.

  “… Go and sit with him [Paris] yourself,” she said at last, wildly. “Forget that you are a goddess. Never set foot in Olympus again, but devote yourself to Paris. Pamper him well, and one day you may be his wife—or else his slave. I refuse to go and share his bed again.…”

  As might be expected, there was an explosion from the furious Aphrodite. She threatened the arrogant mortal until Helen was somewhat cowed and consented at last to an interview with Paris. Reluctantly she left her place on the tower; sulkily she accompanied the goddess to her own bedroom. There Aphrodite pushed home her victory: she seized a chair, carried it herself across the floor to the waiting Paris, and plunked the refractory Helen down on it.

  Even then Helen showed spirit. She was still so angry with Paris that she could not refrain from scolding him, as bitterly as she had rated Aphrodite. And as she was never a hypocrite she continued to talk of Menelaus, that great soldier.

  Was Paris perturbed? Did he hang his head in shame? Or, better still, did he shout at her to hold her tongue, nor mention Menelaus again? Not he; he replied quite calmly and sweetly. Next time, he assured her, he would win. One couldn’t always win. In the meantime——

  “Come, let us go to bed together and be happy in our love,” he said. “Never has such desire overwhelmed me, not even in the beginning—never until now have I been so much in love with you or felt such sweet desire.”

  The unfortunate Helen could only obey him. Out on the battlefield Menelaus searched in vain for Paris. Once more he had been balked of his revenge.

  Some moments later Hector came in haste to his father’s palace, panting and sweaty with the effort of fighting, hot with anger against his young brother.

  “I wish the earth would open and swallow him up,” he said to Hecuba, his mother. “The gods brought him to manhood only to be a thorn in the flesh of the Trojans and my royal father and his sons. If I could see him bound for Hades’ halls, I should say good riddance to bad rubbish.” Hecuba did not demur. It would have taken a reckless woman to argue with Hector just then; besides, she probably agreed with him.

  The hero stormed over to Paris’s house next door and stamped up to the bedroom. There, as he had expected, he found Paris, at his ease with Helen and a number of handmaidens, examining his armor with the anxious eye of a fop, but showing no urgency to put it on again. Vigorously Hector delivered himself of his opinion of such behavior. Helen’s presence did not deter him. He probably felt that she was his ally; I think she may have signaled her approval to him with a flash of her lovely eyes.

  Even Hector, however, could not stir Paris to more than a good-natured, half-sincere apology. Yes, he was probably right, said Paris. The whole thing had been regrettable, but Athene had obviously been on Menelaus’s side. Better luck next time. Yes, he realized it might look rather odd that he hadn’t gone right back to the fighting—Helen had just been saying the same thing, as a matter of fact.

  “Brother,” interrupted Helen, “I am indeed a shameless, evil-minded, and abominable creature. I wish I had found a better husband.”

  Altogether one of the most miserable of family scenes. I pity Helen from the bottom of my heart.

  The war dragged to its close, and all that the gods foretold came to pass. It was a bloody conclusion. Hector was killed and so was Achilles, who had killed Hector. Ilium was sacked and burned; during the final fighting Paris fell. But M
enelaus lived to sail away to Argos in triumph, Helen regained.

  One wonders what her opinion was of all this. The Odyssey gives us as sequel an attractive family scene, a conversation piece which reminds us of an eighteenth-century painting. It is just as artificial in its way as any Zoffany. Helen, sitting in her high-backed chair, reigning over her household gathering, recognized a likeness to Odysseus in the newcomer Telemachus. She became reminiscent. She referred calmly and cheerfully to the bad old days.

  “Shameless creature that I was,” she said to her husband mechanically, in passing reference to the ten years’ war.

  I cannot help feeling that things were not quite on this good-natured basis when she and Menelaus found themselves alone. Even after several years’ time he must have lost his temper when he thought of his wife’s abduction, and there were no doubt plenty of quarrels, inconclusive as such altercations always are, with the pattern monotonously repetitive.

  Menelaus would refer to the best ten years of his life wasted in regaining his wife. Helen would retort that any man who called himself a man need not have taken such a long time about it. Followed a lively discussion as to Paris’s merits and demerits, with due attention to the fatal day when Menelaus had him on the run, to the great detriment of Paris’s dignity. Doubtless Menelaus called Paris a pansy, or the Greek equivalent thereof.

  “Muscle isn’t everything,” Helen retorted.

  “Yet if memory serves me,” said Menelaus, “you admired Hector’s.”

  One thing led to another, and the quarrel always ended, I am sure, in exasperated tears on Helen’s part and a slammed door on Menelaus’s. Really, one doesn’t know which to be sorrier for.

  I hope that when they grew old they made it up for good. I like to think of them then, taking care of each other when they had rheumatism or stubborn summer colds.

  The Warm Voice

  Sappho

  Lo! love the looser of limbs stirs me, that creature irresistible, bitter-sweet; but you, Atthis, have come to hate the thought of me, and run after Andromeda in my stead.

  And what countrified wench in countrified clothes fires your breast, though she knows not how to draw her gown over her ankles?

  So I shall never see Atthis more, and in sooth I might as well be dead. And yet she wept full sore to leave me behind and said: “Alas, how sad our lot; Sappho, I swear ’tis all against my will I leave thee.” And I answered her: “Go your way rejoicing and remember me, for you know how I doted upon you. And if you remember not, O then I will remind you of what you forget, how dear and how beautiful was the life we led together. For with many a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled you have decked your flowing locks by my side, and with many a woven necklet made of a hundred blossoms your dainty throat; and with unguent in plenty, both of the precious and the royal, have you anointed your fair young skin in my bosom, and upon a soft couch had from the hands of gentle serving-maids all that a delicate-living Ionian could desire; and no hill was there, nor holy place nor waterbrook, whither we did not go, nor ever did the crowded noise of the early spring fill any wood with the medley-song of nightingales, but you wandered thither with me.…

  A Chinese woman I knew, who had a brilliant career at Oxford and specialized in Greek, once said to me, “Chinese poetry can’t compare with Greek. It’s not only poetry: Chinese literature in general isn’t comparable with Greek literature. Don’t believe the scholars who tell you ancient Chinese is rich and beautiful. They don’t necessarily think so themselves. After spending all their lives on it, though, they aren’t going to admit they’ve wasted their time.”

  She was particularly fond of Sappho’s poetry, and insisted that no one in early China ever wrote anything so fresh, passionate, and spontaneous. Of course, I told myself, she herself has spent a lifetime on Greek. By her own reasoning, she would not wish to admit—— Still, I see her point about Sappho, however dimly through my own ignorance of Greek.

  The Lesbian poetess, you may argue, has no place in this book, because she had no effect on history. She caused no war, no political reform. Her love affairs, being Sapphic, were sterile; we do not even know exactly who her beloveds were, or, save for Erinna the poetess, what they did. I can only reply to you that Sappho is history. Most of her life is unknown, but that doesn’t matter: she is the first human being whose voice we actually hear. She talks through the ages straight to us, and we understand her. That is inexpressibly important to the world’s story.

  Beyond her on that long road leading back to antiquity the forms we see are indistinct. It is too long ago. All we can swear to is that there were people in those days, and it is for some reason comforting to be sure even of that much. Since they were people not unlike us, I tell myself, they must have loved and quarreled and eaten and slept as we do. Still, one cannot wonder that some races thought and still think of the ancients as monstrously different from themselves—mountain-hurling giants, or many-armed creatures with extra eyes in their foreheads. The innocents know no better, for they have not heard Sappho. She is not a part of their love tradition as she is of ours.

  The moon has set, and the Pleiads; it is the middle of the night and time passes, time passes, and I lie alone.

  The warm voice is heard across twenty-five centuries, as if it were ringing today in the ear. Sappho is as miraculously akin to you and me as is that Dordogne hunter with his buffalo, brightly colored after all the dark years he has endured on the cave wall. Poem and picture reassure me; I am not to be left in solitude, after all, to face the whistling emptiness of Time.

  And I am not the only one she speaks to. Everyone who has listened to Sappho takes possession of her and builds an image of her, usually in reflection of his own. All of which is, I suppose, natural, but it makes discussion of her difficult. The minute you talk about Sappho you step on toes. People are touchy about her. People are touchy in any case about what are generally called The Classics, and when you ask for more trouble by mentioning so controversial a topic as Sappho’s love life, you find yourself floundering in very deep water. Helen of Troy is a far less disturbing subject, but then Helen is a symbol, whereas Sappho is a woman. Symbols are always simpler.

  Examined in clear cold light, without anyone’s theories to confuse the issue, the facts about Sappho are sparse but explosive. She lived about the end of the seventh century B.C., she wrote poems, she loved women. Some of her poems were about girls she loved and others were not. Those others, by our lights, were the conventional ones, but the poems she wrote to women may have been, by her lights, far more conformist and natural. I don’t know. You don’t know. He or she does not know. It doesn’t matter.

  The Greeks do not seem to have thought it mattered either. They admired Sappho’s poems when she wrote them and for at least seven centuries thereafter. But when Jesus Christ had lived and died and the Church took hold of His memory, Sappho, like other early Greeks, came under a cloud. Every writer who had worshiped the pagan gods was suspect. Their literature was suppressed by methods unhappily familiar to us today; their scrolls were burned, and the priests did their best to expunge all memory of pagan poems from the people’s minds, regardless of intrinsic beauty. These censors did a lot of damage, as censors so often do, but in spite of their most earnest and well-meaning efforts a few of Sappho’s writings survived.

  If the essential Sappho has herself survived in some afterworld or otherworld, she may wonder ruefully if these remnants would not have been better undiscovered. She could not deny that they have been the source of sententious foolishness among scholars and readers. The world we inherit has changed. It is still recognizably the same world; we realize that whenever we come upon cave drawings and ancient poems. Nevertheless, there have been changes, and one especially becomes glaringly, painfully evident whenever Sappho’s name is mentioned.

  Today we do not think women should love women, or men, men. We carry it further; in the words of the etiquette books, such love simply is not done. Of course you know what etiqu
ette books are: this statement does not make sense. It is done, actually. Indeed, such love adds up to reams of pages in best-selling novels. Psychoanalysts all over Europe and America (I don’t know about modern Greece) spend a good part of their working days trying to adjust the facts of such a love to a world which does not officially admit them.

  It is possible that this state of affairs annoys Sappho’s shade. But I prefer to believe it doesn’t worry her as much as something else does: the way her name is taken in vain as patron saint of a number of crackpot modern institutions. The word Lesbian itself—what vision does it conjure up? A stocky woman in tailor-made coat and skirt, collar and tie, and heavy brogues, who possibly breeds dogs. I have never understood what in the name of Heaven she has to do with Sappho. She rejects beauty, which Sappho loved. She is a misfit, poor woman, and Sappho was more than accepted as a member of society; she was admired and honored. Our modern Lesbian imitates men, and Sappho never thought such imitation necessary.

  I have arrived too swiftly, as one always does when one talks about Sappho, in the region of conjecture. Was she officially a poet, a government laureate as it were? It seems likely. Did she run a school, an academy, where she taught younger people to write and dance and sing for the temple ceremonies? I am sure of it, not only because many savants seem to think so, but because of what is called “internal evidence,” which as far as I can figure out means one part solid evidence to about five parts intuition. (This shows my amateur status. Real scholars never refer to intuition; they prefer to call it “interpretation.”)

  Here is the slender anecdote which set my mind working. Alcaeus, a brother poet of Lesbos, wrote an ode to Sappho in which he said, “Dark-haired, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho, I would like to say something, but shame holds me back.”