[In the following essay, Ebbott interprets Helen's character in the Iliad as the epic personification of blame and of the consequences of righteous indignation.]

When Aphrodite tells Helen to go to Paris' bed after he has lost his duel with Menelaos, Helen refuses (Il. [Iliad] 3.410-412):

κει̑σε δ' ἐγoν οὐκ εῒμι—νεμεσσητὸν δἐ κεν εἴη—
κείνου πορσανἐουσα λἐχοs· Τρῳαὶ δἐ μ' ὀπίσσω
πα̑σαι μωμήσονται· ἔχω δ' ἄχε' ἄκριτα θυμἳ̑.
I am not going to him—it would arouse nemesis—
to share his bed. The Trojan women hereafter would
all reproach me, and I have endless sorrows in my heart.

Here, after the renewal of the original conflict between Menelaos and Paris, Helen says what the Greeks and Trojans probably wish she had said in the first place—that she will not go to Paris' bed, for it would inspire nemesis, and if she did, all the Trojan women would reproach her. In this mix of past and present, Helen expresses not only that it would be blameworthy of her to go to Paris' bed after his loss to Menelaos, but she also portrays her marriage to Paris as itself blameworthy and worthy of reproach by all the Trojan women.¹

A refusal to go with Paris and to comply with Aphrodite's order is not, however, characteristic of the shameless Helen who had wantonly deserted husband, hearth, and child in order to go with the handsome Trojan. Instead, Helen in the Iliad is intensely aware of shame, nemesis, and the blame produced by her past actions.² She is, in fact, the only character to censure her past deeds, and does so in radical contrast to her status as a prize worthy of this war that is voiced by other characters.³ In each of Helen's appearances in the Iliad, she mentions her marriage(s) and the shame involved in the marriage to Paris and regrets her past action. That is, she relates her shameful deed and expresses a reaction to it. Helen's self-awareness and self-blame are key parts of her character, but it may have been through a standard, formulaic discourse—the funeral lament—that this subversive, otherwise suppressed blame of Helen is introduced into her character and into the Iliad.

The funeral lament contains elements of regret but also of self-awareness and the perceptions of others, These elements are integral to Helen's speeches throughout the Iliad and are also the basis for shame, for, “The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people in the wrong condition.”⁴ The particular discourse of the funeral lament, then, could have introduced the shame that is such a prominent part of Helen's character in the Iliad. In addition, however, speaking about the perceptions of others could also lead to the introduction of nemesis, that is, the reactions of others to shameful deeds, into Helen's speeches. I am suggesting in what follows that Helen's funeral lament contains the seeds of her characterization and self-blame in the Iliad and that her character is defined by both shame and nemesis. My emphasis in this essay is on that aspect of the funeral lament that is concerned with the articulation of others' perceptions of the mourner, since this is the direct connection to the shame and nemesis that characterizes Helen in the Iliad.

In a funeral lament a woman might sing not only about the deceased person but also about how his death affects the mourner's position in society, how she is perceived by others, and how she wishes that things were different. Michael Herzfeld, describing a modern Cretan funeral, gives this background:

Each mourner performs in the face of ever-ready gossip by neighbors and distant kin. If she succeeds in moving them to sympathetic understanding and above all to identification with her personal pain, she may also eventually succeed in raising her social status … It is common for a mourner to accuse her recently deceased parent or brother, for example, of having left her … This pattern of confusion turned to anger … gives lamenting women a medium in which to anticipate what might be said of them—or even done to them—once their source of moral support in an androcentric world has been stripped away.⁵

Helen's funeral lament for Hektor expresses similar sentiments. Helen begins by describing how she is related to Hektor, the very relationship that makes her the object of scorn, and she expresses a wish that she had died before she went with Paris.⁶ After reminding everyone that she had left her home in Greece to come to Troy with Paris, Helen then mourns the loss of her protector from the reproach and abuse of “distant” kin, Paris' brothers and their wives, his sisters and mother. Hektor, she says, was her only friend in Troy, besides Priam, for everyone else shudders when they see her:

τῃ̑σι δ' ἔπειθ' ‘Ελἐνη τριτάτη ἐξη̑ρχε γόοιο·
‘“′Εκτορ, ἐμἳ̑ θυμἳ̑ δαἐρων πολὺ φίλτατε πάντων,
ἣ μἐν μοι πόσιs ἐστίν 'Αλἐξανδροs θεοειδήs,
ὅs μ' ἄγαγε Τροίηνδ'· ὡs πρὶν Ὤφελλον ὀλἐσθαι.
ἤδη γὰρ νυ̑ν μοι τόδ' ἐεικοστὸν ἔτοs ἐστὶν
ἐξ οὔ κει̑θεν ἔβην καὶ ἐμη̑s ἀπελήλυθα πάτρηs·
ἀλλ' οὔ πω σευ̑ ἄκουσα κακὸν ἔποs οὐδ' ἀσύφηλον·
ἀλλ' εἴ τίs με καὶ ἄλλοs ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἐνίπτοι
δαἐρων e γαλόων e εἰνατἐρων εὐπἐ]πλων,
e ἑκυρή—ἑκυρὸs δὲ πατὴρ os eπιοs αἰεί—,
ἀλλὰ σὺ τὸν ἐπἐεσσι παραιφάμενοs κατἐρυκεs,
σῃ̑ τ' ἀγανοφροσύνῃ καὶ σοι̑s ἀγανοι̑s ἐπἐεσσι.
τω̑ σἐ θ' ἅμα κλαίω καὶ ἔμ' ἄμμορον ἀχνυμἐνη κη̑ρ·
οὐ γάρ τίs μοι ἔτ' ἄλλοs ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ
eπιοs οὐδὲ φίλοs, πάντεs δἐ με πεφρίκασιν.”

(Il. 24.761-775)

Then Helen, last of the three, took the lead in the lamentation:
“Hektor, dearest by far of all my husband's brothers to my heart,
Yes, my husband is godlike Alexander,
who brought me to Troy. How I wish I had died before that!
For now it is already the twentieth year
since I left there, departing from my homeland.
But not once have I heard a mean or degrading word from you.
But if someone else in the halls would abuse me,
one of my husband's brothers or sisters or one of the well dressed wives of his brothers
or his mother—but his father was always as kind as my own father—
then you, winning them over with words, held them back
with your gentle manner and your mild words.
Therefore I mourn you and myself at the same time, grieving in my ill-fated heart,
there is no one left for me in broad Troy who is a kind friend;
everyone else is repulsed at the sight of me.”

Helen's lament, like a modern Cretan one, “accuses” Hektor of leaving her defenseless, for she says she mourns for herself as well as for him. The wish that she had died before going to Troy with Paris is the regret of someone feeling shame.⁷ She also examines what her social position will be. Just as Andromache sings in her lament (Il. 24.725-745) about what will happen to her and to Astyanax, Helen, too, sings about what will happen to her. Hektor was the one who was restraining the other members of Paris' family from blaming Helen directly, and Helen's lament expresses a strong awareness of what others will be allowed to say openly about her now that her supporter Hektor has been taken from her. This prior restraint implies, however, that such nemesis is already present. Mention of the public scorn that she knows she will receive (and that she reveals has been present all along) in this familiar mode of discourse may have been the starting point for its introduction into Helen's character: the funeral lament served as the door through which the otherwise unspoken nemesis toward Helen enters the story of the Iliad.

The funeral lament could have influenced Helen's character throughout the Iliad because of the methods of composition of the Iliad. Mabel Lang describes how the current form of the Iliad may have resulted from a transformation of a straightforward war story into the story of the wrath of Achilles.⁸ Arguing from the fact that the Iliad covers most of the entire Trojan War and not just this short period in the tenth year and from the incongruities of the Iliad as we have it, she posits three major points about the “poetic pre-history” of the Iliad: first is that the story of the Trojan War was very familiar to Homer's audience; second, she observes:

At least one early and highly influential account of the Trojan War began at the beginning and included at the outset of the Achaean expedition a Catalogue of ships. … It almost goes without saying that any account of the war that began at the beginning with the sailing of the expeditionary force would have gone on in chronicle form and ended with the war's end.

Her third point is that this “chronicle” story of the Trojan War ended with an Achaean victory.⁹ She goes on to argue that the introduction of Achilles' story into the tale of the Trojan War resulted in a recomposition of the poem. This recomposition was designed to “enclose the Trojan War in the wrath story”¹⁰ by framing the older material within the new focus of the story. Lang conjectures that this reframing method, “which may have been attempted earlier but certainly culminated in the Iliad, was to intermingle the tales by means of various kinds of reverberation, echo, and reflection.”¹¹ Since the earlier war story ended with an Achaean triumph, it would have had to include the death of Hektor, since his death signals the fall of Troy. Helen, as his kinswoman, could have given a funeral lament in that earlier version as well.¹² The focus on the wrath of Achilles, however, is precisely what introduced the question of the value of the war and its object, whether that object be Helen herself or the κλἐοs ‘glory, renown’ she represents for Achilles.¹³ During this transformation Helen's characterization might have begun to be shaped by the questioning of the war and of the worth of the prize, that is, of Helen herself. Helen, as I argue further below, is the one who brings attention to this question of her worth as the prize of this war, since she is the one to articulate the blame for her own deeds. Through oral recomposition, however, sentiments voiced in, and properly belonging to, the funeral lament could reverberate, echo, and be further developed in Helen's other appearances to define her role as the voice of nemesis over her own deeds.

Andromache's appearances in the Iliad are a parallel example of this infusion of sentiments from the funeral lament into other speeches.¹⁴ Andromache gives a formal funeral lament for Hektor at Il. 24.725-745 and also delivers a lament for him when she comes to the walls and sees a dead Hektor being dragged by Achilles (Il. 22.477-514). Andromache's laments are prefigured in her one other appearance in the Iliad, her speech to Hektor at Il. 6.407-439. Here, too, she laments what her and Astyanax' circumstances will be once Hektor is gone: “… ἐμοὶ δἐ κε κἐρδιον εἴη / σευ̑ ἀφαμαρτούσῃ χθόνα δύμεναι· οὐ γὰρ ἔτ' ἄλλη / ἔσται θαλπωρή. ἐπεὶ ἄν σύ γε πότμον ἐπίσπῃs, / ἀλλ' ἄχε'· οὐδἐ μοι ἔστι πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ” ([Il. 6.410-413] ‘… and it would be better for me, being deprived of you, to plunge into the earth, for there will be no other consolation when you meet your fate, only sorrows, for I do not have my father and honored mother’).¹⁵ The wish to die along with the mourned person and the elaboration of the mourner's inconsolable grief and lack of any “protector” are all elements of a ritual lament. Even Andromache's plea that Hektor not leave her (Il. 6.431-434) can be seen as part of a ritual lament, for, after Hektor has left, she and her female servants mourn (γόον) him though he is still living (Il. 6.500). Andromache's speech here is defined and developed through the form of the lament.

In an article based on an essay that was first delivered at the CorHaLi conference in Lausanne,¹⁶ Richard Martin argues that Helen's character is a paradigm of the expert performer of laments. He concludes from his examination of these speeches in light of traditional Greek funeral laments performed in modern Greece that Helen's speeches contain phrases and strategies of the lament genre and that the audience would thus think of a mourning woman when they heard Helen's earlier speeches in the Iliad. Andromache's speech in Book 6, which echoes her funeral lament, would have the same effect—the audience would hear her lamenting Hektor in her speech even before they hear that she mourns for him after he departs.

Martin produces several examples, especially from Book 3 of the Iliad and Book 4 of the Odyssey, which convincingly demonstrate that Helen's speeches are “tagged” as laments by certain phrases and sentiments without being explicitly introduced as laments. He compares elements in Helen's speeches to elements in other speeches in Homer that are labeled as laments and to modern Greek laments. My emphasis in this essay is on those elements of the funeral lament—blame, shame, and the social perceptions and treatment of the mourner—that I argue have shaped Helen's character in the Iliad. Indeed, basic elements of Helen's funeral lament—the description of her present situation as wife of Paris, her wish that she had died before that happened, and the references to the public scorn she receives from the Trojans—are interwoven into her other speeches. Helen mentions her marriage to Paris and/or her former marriage to Menelaos in each of her appearances (Il. 3.174-175, 180, 403-404 when she speaks to Aphrodite; 428-429 when she is back with Paris; and to Hektor at Il. 6.344-358). She wishes two other times that she had died before coming to Troy (Il. 3.173; 6.345-348) and also mentions the rebuke and reproach that is hers (Il. 3.242, 410-412). Mention of the Trojan women at Il. 3.411 may also reflect the funeral lament as the source of this emphasis on the women's disapproval in particular, since it is at funerals that women have the lead in speaking.

Helen's speech to Hektor in Book 6 is an excellent example of parallels to her funeral lament. She addresses Hektor as her δαήρ daêr ‘husband's brother’, in both places, emphasizing her relationship with him and possibly using the lament formula of addressing relatives by their relationship title rather than by name.¹⁷ She wishes she had died on the day she was born, before she was brought to Troy:

δα̑ερ ἐμει̑ο κυνὸs κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοἐσσηs,
ὥs μ' ὄφελ' ἤματι τἳ̑ ὅτε με πρω̑τον τἐκε μήτηρ
οἴχεσθαι προφἐρουσα κακὴ ἀνἐμοιο θύελλα
εἰs ὄροs e εἰs κυ̑μα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσηs,
ἔνθα με κυ̑μ' ἀπόερσε πάροs τάδε ἔργα γενἐσθαι.

(Il. 6.344-348)

Brother-in-law to me, a bitch who contrives evil and causes others to shudder,
how I wish that on that day when my mother first gave birth to me
a violent windstorm had come, bearing me away
to the mountains, or into the waves of the crashing sea
where the tide would have swept me away before these things had happened.

Beyond incorporating motifs from a funeral lament, however, we see in this example that Helen's speech has become quite elaborate in her wish to die and in her self-insults. Martin points out that Helen's wish for bitter death in Il. 3.173 would make the audience think of grieving language. That may also be the case here in Book 6, but this time Helen wishes for a particularly violent death while describing herself in most unflattering terms. The verbal and conceptual similarities between Helen's funeral lament and her other speeches demonstrate a link that could lead to the intense self-blame that is seen in Helen's speeches.¹⁸ Martin argues that lament as a genre includes blame: grief and revenge coexist in the same laments in modern Greece. The form of lament, which has clearly influenced Helen's speeches in the Iliad, has used elements that express blame, shame, and nemesis or revenge to turn these forces back onto Helen herself.

Awareness of her own social position and of others' perceptions and opinions of her is, we have seen, an integral part of Helen's funeral lament. An awareness of one's own position is fundamental for the experience of shame, and the opinions of others are the basis of nemesis. Bernard Williams defines the relationship between shame and nemesis this way:

The reaction in Homer to someone who has done something that shame should have prevented is nemesis, a reaction that can be understood, according to the context, as ranging from shock, contempt, and malice to righteous rage and indignation. It should not be thought that nemesis and its related words are ambiguous. It is defined as a reaction, and what it psychologically consists of properly depends on what particular violation of aidôs it is a reaction to.¹⁹

Helen, using speech that resembles both the blame and the self-awareness that are integral to lament, expresses both the shame and the nemesis about her own deeds in her own speeches. Since her particular violation of aidôs was a severe one, the nemesis that her own speeches articulate is, in turn, harsh. The insults that Helen hurls at herself, such as κυνω̑πιs ‘shameless’ (Il. 3.180), στυγερή ‘loathsome’ (Il. 3.404), and κυνόs κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοἐσσηs ‘a bitch who contrives evil and causes others to shudder’ (Il. 6.344) with the quite violent wish to die that follows, and κυνὸs ‘bitch’ (Il. 6.356) express the nemesis produced by her own shameful deeds, which she also announces in the same speeches.²⁰

Thus both shame, the personal reaction to one's own social transgressions, and nemesis, the community's reaction to these misdeeds, are integral parts of Helen's speeches and her character in the Iliad. The recognition of this, however, leads to the question of why these elements became so crucial to Helen's characterization and why she is the one and only person to express the nemesis that her actions have produced.

In Helen's first appearance in the Iliad, we encounter the contrast between what others say about her and what Helen says about herself. When the elders of Troy behold Helen approaching the walls of the city, they say to one another:

οὐ νἐμεσιs Τρω̑αs καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδαs 'Αχαιοὺs
τοιῃ̑δ' ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν·
αἰνω̑s ἀθανάτῃσι θεῃ̑s εἰs oπα ἔοικεν·
ἀλλὰ καὶ os τοίη περ ἐου̑σ' ἐν νηυσὶ νεἐσθω,
μηδ' ἡμι̑ν τεκἐεσσί τ' ὀπίσσω πη̑μα λίποιτο.

(Il. 3.156-160)

There is no nemesis for Trojans and well greaved Achaeans
for suffering hardships for a long time for a woman like this one.
Her face is strikingly like that of an immortal goddess.
But, even though she is such, let her go home in the ships
and not be left as a cause of woe to us and our children in the future.

We might suppose that this is the Trojans' opinion of Helen and her place among them, since elders are fitting representatives of the community's views.²¹ This is followed by Priam's opinion that Helen is not the cause of the war (Il. 3.164). Helen's entrance into the action of the poem, then, inspires many contradictory, or at least confused, statements about her. As Suzuki notes, “The difficulty of interpreting Helen … becomes more rather than less acute when she actually enters the poem.”²² According to the elders, she is a worthy cause for a protracted war and the suffering of many hardships by both the Trojans and the Greeks, but the Trojans want her to leave them anyway. Priam's statement to Helen after he calls her over is a strong removal of blame, since he specifically says that the gods, not she, are the cause, the aitia, of the war ([Il. 3.164] οὔ τί μοι αἰτίη ἐσσί, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν ‘In my opinion, you are not at all to blame. Now I think the gods are to blame’). Helen's response, however, is to detail exactly how she is to blame by describing how she left Menelaos for Paris and to wish she had died before those very events that precipitated the war had happened:

ὡs ὄφελεν θάνατόs μοι ἁδει̑ν κακὸs ὁππότε δευ̑ρο
υἱἐϊ σἳ̑ ἑπόμην, θάλαμον γνωτούs τε λιπου̑σα
παι̑δά τε τηλυγἐτην καὶ ὁμηλικίην ἐρατεινήν.
ἀλλὰ τά γ' οὐκ ἐγἐνοντο· τὸ καὶ κλαίουσα τἐτηκα.

(Il. 3.173-176)

How I wish that wicked death had been pleasing to me,
when I followed your son here, leaving behind my marriage chamber,
my relatives, my daughter entering womanhood and my delightful age mates.
But this did not happen: and now I have pined away, weeping.

The wish to die recalls or echoes the funeral lament, of course, but nemesis or outward blame is equally apparent. For an audience who is familiar with the shameless Helen, it might not be surprising for someone else to blame Helen with similar words (e.g., “How I wish that death had been pleasing to her before she followed Paris here”). Helen emphasizes this blame again when she replies that Priam is looking at Agamemnon, for in her description of him she ends with the fact that he was once her brother-in-law, κυνω̑πιs ‘shameless woman’ that she is (Il. 3.180). The mention of her relationship to Agamemnon, which implicitly refers to her marriage to Menelaos, coupled with an insult and coming right after her delineation of her past actions, focuses her entire first speech on the marriage that she betrayed. When Helen comes to see the duel for which she is the prize, she is the one to announce that she is the casus belli by recounting exactly what she did.

Helen continues to tell Priam who the men he picks out on the field are, informing him about Odysseus and Ajax, but then she wonders why she does not see her brothers, Castor and Pollux (Il. 3.347).²³ She supposes that either they did not come from Lacedaemon to fight or that they did, but now they do not wish to go to the battlefield fearing the shameful words and all the reproach that is hers (Il. 3.234-242). The two lines that report the earlier death of Castor and Pollux bring the teikhoskopia ‘view from the wall’ to a rather abrupt close, and we are left with the remark that there is great dishonor for Helen among the Greeks. She assumes that her brothers would be ashamed of her and either would not come to Troy at all to fight for her or would, once at Troy, keep themselves back from battle because of the insults that Greeks fighting on her behalf would heap upon Helen.²⁴ We hear a great deal of what the warriors say on the battlefield; we do not, however, hear them condemning Helen (Il. 3.357).²⁵ Once again, what Helen says about herself is in direct contrast to what we hear others say about her in the Iliad. Helen presents an alternate assessment of her behavior and the reaction of others to it. She presumes the shame her brothers would feel before the nemesis, the reaction of the other Greek warriors, which would naturally follow from her own shameful deed. Helen, however, is the one whom we hear reacting with nemesis to the deeds of Helen.

In the Iliad, others do not expressly blame Helen, and so Helen divulges the nemesis that others do not and cannot speak. Others speak of Helen as a prize, as the object of the war, but each time Helen speaks, she reminds us that she left her husband Menelaos and married Paris and that she is an object of blame and scorn. That is, she reminds us that she has acted shamefully and that her actions have produced a resulting nemesis. Although we hear Hektor speak similar reproaches to, and about, Paris (e.g., Il. 3.39-40; 6.281-282),²⁶ we hear of Helen's ignominy only from Helen herself.²⁷ Suzuki sees Helen as a figure of difference because of her conflicting tradition of blame and exoneration and says that she has a heightened perception because of her position: “Through Helen's liminal position in this society, which divides her loyalties but also gives her a perspective that comprehends such divisions, the poet represents her complex inwardness and subjectivity—much as he does in representing Achilles, a warrior withdrawn from combat.”²⁸ Thus Helen is able to express a view of herself and the war fought εἵνεκα ‘Ελἐνηs ‘because of Helen, for Helen's sake’²⁹ that is different from everything else we hear from others.³⁰ She is the one to challenge her own worthiness as the object of the war by presenting her actions in the light of the nemesis that is provoked by them.

Because shame and nemesis are integral to Helen's character, we must note that she is placed only in situations where she will be the only one to carry out this blame of herself, again allowing this alternative view to be voiced only by Helen herself. For Helen expresses the public condemnation of her actions, but she speaks to people who do not feel the same way. In her conversations in the story, Helen speaks only to Priam, to Aphrodite, to Paris, and to Hektor. Obviously, Helen will not have the opportunity to talk with any Greek men who might reproach her, since she is out of their reach, but Helen does not appear with any Trojan women whose censure she knows and says is present.³¹ Graver, arguing that Homer is integrating a separate poetic tradition about Helen into his portrait, states that the Homeric epics leave blame poetry out of their songs:

For in Helen, the epic tradition welcomes the figure of scandal into its own subject matter, but welcomes her on the epic poet's own terms. Both Iliad and Odyssey present a narrative about her—not the narrative of her infamy, but a different narrative—and both do so in a way that studiously avoids direct censure.³²

Studious avoidance is partly achieved by having Helen speak only to those who are on her side, who are her protectors, but the poem has plenty of direct censure of Helen from Helen herself. The blame that perhaps existed in a contemporary poetic tradition and that surely would have existed in some story of Helen and Paris has been displaced from a community reaction of nemesis to Helen's own self-blame.

This displacement produces a paradox between the Helen we know—the shameless Helen—and the Helen we find in the Iliad. In this poem Helen is a woman who knows and respects shame; yet, by her own admission, she is also a shameless woman.³³ Leslie Collins argues that Helen is espousing the views of the community and that her “posture of self-blame” is meant both to mitigate her transgression of the social code that she is now manifesting and to allow this paradox to go unnoticed:³⁴

The fact that the blame of Helen is expressed primarily by Helen herself—for Helen is made to testify to a public hostility which Homer otherwise does not directly depict—further advances the ideological interests of the poem. In a word, only Helen can blame Helen without exposing the paradox that the poem wishes to remain hidden: that the very act which necessitates a war over her also condemns her from the poem's point of view, and renders her an unworthy object of struggle. The Iliad's portrait of a reformed and contrite Helen is certainly formed in answer to this paradox.

The complexity and ambiguity of Helen results from her mixed identity of shame and shamelessness³⁵ and from the mix of a personal reaction of shame and the public reaction of nemesis in her speeches. Collins argues that Helen's own identity is denied when she presents this different view of her own behavior:

Indeed, it is Helen who is made to bear sole witness to the way in which the dominant community views her. And Helen is made to agree with them, to embrace the orthodox values against which she once transgressed; she is thus made to reject the ethics of her patroness and thus of her own identity.³⁶

Austin also describes the ambiguity inherent in Helen:

The old men's response to Helen epitomizes her ambiguity. ‘It is no disgrace that the Greeks and the Trojans suffer long evils for such a woman,’ they say, using the word nemesis, the strongest term in Homer's shame culture for “blame.” The Trojan War is no cause shame on either side. … But the elders of Troy could not be more mistaken, thinking their war over Helen was free of nemesis: Helen is nemesis.³⁷

Thus Helen, as Nemesis, presents the righteous indignation about her marriage to Paris and about the war that has resulted from it. Although the war may provide the opportunity for κλἐοs ‘glory, renown’ for those fighting over Helen, nemesis still attends the war because of and through Helen herself.

As Collins argues, the Trojan War is concerned with certain social values, including a regard for shame and nemesis, but the combatants are fighting for a woman who has, by her actions, disregarded these same values. This produces the paradox Collins points out.³⁸ It is true that only Helen can blame Helen, for if another person, with the exception of the embittered Achilles who is able to utter one negative yet awesome adjective about Helen, were to speak about her as a κυνω̑πιs ‘shameless woman’³⁹ or to wish she had died before she caused this war, she would be exposed as a prize unworthy of the deaths of so many men. But does the paradox go unnoticed? The nemesis toward Helen and her marriage is fully expressed—by Helen herself.⁴⁰ How would the audience react to a Helen who obviously knows and feels shame? The reason why the shame and nemesis associated with Helen emerged may have been the same one that focused the poem on the focused the poem on the wrath of Achilles. Since Helen is the object of the war, her very value is examined in conjunction with the question concerning the worth of the war. Like the merit of fighting for κλἐοs ‘glory, renown’ itself, the value of Helen cannot stand unquestioned within the Iliad.⁴¹ And, as Fuqua has pointed out about the Odyssey, “it is the characters and not the ‘invisible poet’ who set the standards that shape the ideals and principles of the epic.”⁴² Thus, it cannot be the narrator who questions Helen's worth, but one of the characters must address Helen's disgrace. As we have seen, only Helen can do this and so, to allow the alternative viewpoint to emerge, Helen herself must present the negative reaction to her own behavior.

Helen committed an act that shame should have prevented. The “equal and opposite reaction” would be nemesis. The expression of nemesis from others has been necessarily repressed, however, due to her status as a prize, and so is displaced to Helen herself. The funeral lament, with the mourner's articulation of the perceptions of others, opened the door for this nemesis to enter epic, and the negative view of Helen conventionally belonged to Helen's own lament as an accurate reflection of her status after the death of Hektor. As the focus of the story of the Trojan War shifted to the story of the wrath of Achilles, a critical view of Helen gained importance as an accompanying question about the reasons for the war, and so sentiments proper to the funeral lament became features of all of Helen's speeches. Thus, the blame that Helen speaks is not just an internal one—shame—but, more importantly, she gives voice to the external blame, the nemesis, that her deeds provoke but that is otherwise unspoken in the Iliad.

Notes

1. Suzuki 1989:37 argues that the past Helen and her motivations are omitted from the Iliad: “The poet portrays the present Helen and leaves her past self a mystery. He represents Helen as an almost disembodied consciousness passively living out the effects of her fatal act. Despite the uncertainty and ambiguity of her identity and nature, Helen, paradoxically, is overdetermined by that one act in her life.” We see the “ashamed” Helen in her speeches as opposed to the presumably “shameless” past Helen, as I discuss below.

2. I confine my examination of Helen's character here only to her character in the Iliad.

3. The only mortal character who speaks ill of Helen directly is Achilles, when he calls her ῥιγεδανή at Il. 19.325. His choice of adjective, ‘to be shuddered at’ is, however, very similar to how Helen describes herself at Il. 6.344 and Il. 24.775. Suzuki 1989:20 notes that it is through focusing on Achilles that the authority of the war and its rationale are questioned. The “shuddering” that they both describe may thus be connected to the questioning of such a war over such a woman, and so it is entirely appropriate for Achilles to speak an adjective that combines dread and awe.

4. Williams 1993:78. He later notes (82) that the “gaze of another” involved in shame can certainly be “the imagined gaze of an imagined other.” The “others” that a mourner sings about are real and, in Helen's case, specified, but the internalization of shame is still an important concept for Helen's characterization.

5. Herzfeld 1993:244.

6. Alexiou 1974:178 points out that this wish of the mourners for their own death before that of the dead person's or for never having been born is a common one, and cites Andromache's (Andromache voices this desire at Il. 22.481) and Helen's funeral laments as ancient examples.

7. Williams 1993:84 describes the reaction of someone who is feeling shame as “not just the desire to hide, to hide my face, but the desire to disappear, not to be there.” The wish to die that is common in funeral laments shapes the wish to disappear into a specific way to disappear here.

8. Lang 1995.

9. Lang 149-50.

10. Lang 150.

11. Lang 150-151.

12. Alexiou 1974:12 makes a point that Helen is given kinswoman status in the funeral lament, but Suzuki 1989:54-55 also applies Alexiou's point about Briseis' role as a stranger mourning for Patroklos to Helen, noting the similarities in their laments. The general ambiguity surrounding Helen allows her to be kinswoman and stranger simultaneously.

13. Clader 1976:12-13 discusses Helen as a symbol of the κλἐοs for which Achilles is fighting, since he was not one of her suitors and thus not bound by the suitors' agreement. Suzuki 1989:20 argues that the Iliad “questions the authority of the prevailing ethos among the aristocratic warriors on both sides” by focusing on warriors like Achilles and Hektor who “experience these fissures in the heroic code.”

14. Lang 1995:157 argues that Andromache's role was shaped during this transmutation into an “equivalent but contrasting role” to that of Briseis. This would be a similar instance of the power that the growing prominence of Achilles' story had to reshape other characters in relation to its new emphasis.

15. Note that even in Andromache's “lament” sentiments proper to the lament, such as wishing to “plunge into the earth,” sound like the reaction of someone who is ashamed and thus wishes to disappear completely.

16. May 1995.

17. Martin argues that Helen is using this lament convention when she addresses Priam as her φίλε ἑκυρἐ (Il. 3.172).

18. Graver 1995:57 sees Helen's self-blame as part of another poetic tradition about her story. Referring to lines Il. 3.355-358 she says: “From the standpoint of performance, Helen's words direct us to a poetic tradition that treated her and Paris quite harshly, as morally degenerate or as responsible for the deaths of Hektor and other heroes. Only in such a tradition could it be considered an evil fate to be made the subject of song.” If Helen's self-blame does reflect a separate tradition, I would still see the funeral lament as the way that this self-blame was incorporated into Helen's character in this tradition.

19. Williams 1993:80.

20. See Clader 1976 for a discussion of these epithets as relating to Helen as a bearer or symbol of death. See Graver 1995 for a discussion of the “dog”-related insults as indicating Helen's greed, taking more than her share.

21. Obviously, the view expressed by the elders has its own contradictions. Collins 1988:43-44 notes that in the elders' speech, “Helen is here both blamed for the war and yet praised by the fact that the war can be fought over her. For, as the old men see it, the war is a tribute to and affirmation of her worth.” Suzuki (1989:35) also notes that “the poet conveys a radical ambivalence in the Trojan counselors toward her [Helen].”

22. Suzuki 1989:34.

23. See Jenkins (this volume) for a discussion of these lines as allusion to the myth of Theseus' rape of Helen and her rescue by her brothers.

24. Austin 1994:48 emphasizes that these lines highlight Helen's shame: “Helen assumes the worst: her brothers, kinsmen and dauntless warriors though they are, did not dare show themselves on the battlefield for shame (Il. 3.326-342). Her assumption is incorrect, but that is less important than Helen's reminder that the spectacle to which she has been so gracefully invited, by Iris first on the divine plane, and then by Priam on the human plane, is the spectacle of her own shame, or lack of it.”

25. And we do hear from Hektor that the Trojans who are fighting on his behalf heap scorn on Paris when he leaves the battlefield in Il. 6.524-525.

26. Notice also that, in these reproaches, Hektor wishes that Paris had never been born or would die now; the language is very similar to Helen's language about herself, and thus we see that these wishes are not only connected to lament language but also to that of blame and nemesis.

27. Collins 1988:45; Graver 1995:41, where she notes that Helen is doubly unique in her self-reproach, for not only does no one else insult Helen but also no one else insults Paris the way Helen does.

28. Suzuki 1989:19.

29. E.g., Il. 2.161,177; 9.339, where Helen is the reason for the war or for the deaths of so many Achaeans.

30. Suzuki 1989:56 also sees Helen's funeral lament as an opportunity to present a different viewpoint on the overall heroic theme: “Homer's Helen, in this final expression of remorse and self-hatred, again poses the question of her responsibility—a question that remains unanswered in the Iliad. Achilles' reconciliation with Priam, which accomplishes a bridging of important divisions and oppositions in the poem, is momentary and passing; ultimately it gives way to a renewed perception of the tragic disjunction of heroic society that marks its passing. Helen of Argos, the poem's primary figure of difference, embodies and voices this perception by closing the poem with a funeral lament for Hektor, the best of the Trojans.”

31. Austin 1994:8, 41 points out that Helen is alienated especially from women: “Helen is banished too but to her own room, secluded not only from the men but from the grieving wives and widows, to hide her shame.”

32. Graver 1995:57.

33. Austin 1994:12 believes that this partly results from Helen's origins as a local goddess in Sparta. Some divine characteristics are still seen in the Iliad's Helen, although she is mortal: “Helen is strangely both a goddess and a human at the same time and therefore occupies both circles, of Meaning and Being. A woman who has no reason to fear either nemesis or death is not a human but a god. Yet this same person is very much a human in her function as an object of contention among men, as other women are, a prisoner to the social order. As a goddess Helen transcends shame, yet, as a woman, she is acutely conscious of her function, to be the icon of shame.” See also Clader 1976 for evidence about the divine origins and aspects of Helen. The paradox of Helen is furthered in that, although she does not have to fear nemesis from others, she is the one to articulate the nemesis that exists but is not expressed.

34. Collins 1988:51, 57-58.

35. Austin 1994:29: “Only she [Helen] must, consistently and from the beginning, learn to convert (or subvert) the stuff of her daily life into her function as the glyph for ‘shame/shamelessness’ in the storybook of the tribe.”

36. Collins 1988:45.

37. Austin 1994:43. He refers to Hesiod fragments 197.8 MW and 204.82 MW and Callimachus' Hymn to Artemis (232) for a mythical tradition that calls Helen the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis.

38. Collins 1988:45.

39. A word that Helen uses of herself in both the Iliad (3.180) and the Odyssey (4.145), that Agamemnon uses of Clytemnestra (Od. 11.424), and that Hephaistos uses of both Hera (Il. 18.396) and Aphrodite (Od. 8.319 in Demodokos' song).

40. Graver 1995:59 sees the epic poet's desire to keep blame poetry out of epic as influencing Helen's self-blame: “This hostility to blame as a mode of discourse may help to explain the reflexivity of Helen's blame. It is a device answering to the special need of performers to subjectivize the blame of this character that is so central to the Troy legend. By restricting the reminders of a defamatory tradition to the purview of a single character, the poet-narrator is able to protect his own threatened objectivity.” I think that the epic is intentionally allowing this other view into the poem so that Helen is blamed in some way, which may be what Graver means when she talks about the poet's “objectivity.”

41. Suzuki 1989:9-30 argues that Homer emphasizes this challenge to her worth and finds her value inadequate by contrasting her abstractness with the more concrete images of the other warriors' wives and children.

42. Fuqua 1991:57.

Bibliography

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