"Better off Dead"
Helen's Lament for Hektor in Iliad 24
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Once Hektor’s body is brought back to Troy, Priam and his family prepare for the term of burial promised by Achilles. Following the preparation of the body, three women of the household stand to sing laments in Hektor’s honor. Helen is the last.
Homer, Iliad 24.761-775
“Among them then Helen was the third to take up the lament”
‘Hektor, you were by far the dearest of my in-laws—
My husband was actually godlike Alexandros,
The one who brought me to Troy. I wish I had died before that.
This is the twentieth years since I arrived from there
And I left my own homeland.
But I have never heard an evil or cruel word from you.
But if anyone else in our home would criticize me,
One of your brothers or sisters or one of their spouses
Or my mother in law—since your father was always as gentle as my own
Then you would hold them back by persuading them with words,
With your very kindness and your kind words.
So, I am weeping for you now and my unlucky self, aggrieved in my heart.
No one else in the wide land of Troy will be here for me,
As gentle and as dear, and everyone else is rough to me.’ ”
τῇσι δ’ ἔπειθ’ ῾Ελένη τριτάτη ἐξῆρχε γόοιο·
῞Εκτορ ἐμῷ θυμῷ δαέρων πολὺ φίλτατε πάντων,
ἦ μέν μοι πόσις ἐστὶν ᾿Αλέξανδρος θεοειδής,
ὅς μ’ ἄγαγε Τροίηνδ’· ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλον ὀλέσθαι.
ἤδη γὰρ νῦν μοι τόδε εἰκοστὸν ἔτος ἐστὶν
ἐξ οὗ κεῖθεν ἔβην καὶ ἐμῆς ἀπελήλυθα πάτρης·
ἀλλ’ οὔ πω σεῦ ἄκουσα κακὸν ἔπος οὐδ’ ἀσύφηλον·
ἀλλ’ εἴ τίς με καὶ ἄλλος ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἐνίπτοι
δαέρων ἢ γαλόων ἢ εἰνατέρων εὐπέπλων,
ἢ ἑκυρή, ἑκυρὸς δὲ πατὴρ ὣς ἤπιος αἰεί,
ἀλλὰ σὺ τὸν ἐπέεσσι παραιφάμενος κατέρυκες
σῇ τ’ ἀγανοφροσύνῃ καὶ σοῖς ἀγανοῖς ἐπέεσσι.
τὼ σέ θ’ ἅμα κλαίω καὶ ἔμ’ ἄμμορον ἀχνυμένη κῆρ·
οὐ γάρ τίς μοι ἔτ’ ἄλλος ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ
ἤπιος οὐδὲ φίλος, πάντες δέ με πεφρίκασιν.
Helen’s speech has the appearance of being rather simple and personal, absent the kinds of rhetorical flourish one might expect from a Periklean funeral oration or a modern eulogy. She offers something of an odd balance between personal reflections and echoes of the larger war. As we saw earlier in book 6, she marks Hektor out for her kindness to him—which has led to speculation among some that she manipulated him or that there is something more going on between them—but notice that Hektor’s character in caring for her is consonant with his identity as a protector. Within Troy, he kept her safe from her in-laws with kind and persuasive words. The softness she recalls may help us imagine a Hektor who was ill-at-ease with the language of rebuke and invective, perhaps centering more the man who spent some of his final moments fantasizing about talking to Achilles the way young lovers do.
The three laments taken up in turn can be seen as the beginning of generating Hektor’s kleos. The language of the speech introduction, “taking turn, or taking lead” (ἐξῆρχε) evokes singers/or speakers taking turns in the telling of the tale. Yet each woman in the series tells a story of Hektor that is not about his martial glory. Instead, they focus on what he provided and what they will miss in their loss. Andromache looks ahead to a future where she and Astyanax are enslaved (or worse) after the fall of Troy. Hecuba laments all of her other dead sons and the way Achilles mistreated Hektor’s body.
As with the laments for Patroklos, we find a tension between mourners lamenting the loss of life and what they see in their own life in the wake of this ‘new’ experience. Andromache, his wife, sees herself and her son in the future, imagining the consequences of Hektor’s absence. Hecuba sees the immediate present and the past, enrolling Hektor into a catalogue of losses in which he is the final entry and the most painful. Helen expands and personalizes: she provides the audience with a different picture of Hektor and then sees their grief as joined: when she says “So, I am weeping for you now and my unlucky self, aggrieved in my heart”(τὼ σέ θ' ἅμα κλαίω καὶ ἔμ' ἄμμορον ἀχνυμένη κῆρ) we could imagine her in the vein of Andromache, imagining her own suffering without Hektor their to protect me. But I think we also find a rather direct and significant articulation of the tension we all face in mourning the dead, the tension I mentioned Achilles inhabiting when he laments the loss of Patroklos—navigating the pain of the loss of a loved one from your life while also starting to conceive of the full meaning of a life lost for a loved one.'
Helen also provides several phrases that connect her intensely personal testimony to the larger cosmic framework of their shared suffering. She asserts—almost regretfully—that she is Alexander’s (Paris’) spouse, but wishes she had died before he took her from home (ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλον ὀλέσθαι). The language she uses here echoes when Hektor wishes Paris had died unmarried in book 3 (αἴθ' ὄφελες ἄγονός τ' ἔμεναι ἄγαμός τ' ἀπολέσθαι, 3.40), when Helen herself wishes Paris had died on the battlefield in book 3 (ἤλυθες ἐκ πολέμου· ὡς ὤφελες αὐτόθ' ὀλέσθαι, 3.428), when the trojan Herald addresses the Achaeans in book 5 and similarly wishes Paris had died (ἠγάγετο Τροίηνδ'· ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλ' ἀπολέσθαι, 7.390) and, less clearly, when Achilles wishes Briseis had died before he brought her to Troy in book 19 (τὴν ὄφελ' ἐν νήεσσι κατακτάμεν ῎Αρτεμις ἰῷ, 19.59). In echoing these lines, Helen downplays her agency while also prompting the audience to think of the larger framework of the conflict. Helen’s tendency to self-deprecate, as Ruby Blondell argues, is a way to reclaim agency. Book 24
When she says, “this is the twentieth year since I left my homeland”, I think she is invoking the whole arc of the Trojan War, from her marriage to this moment in time. While the scholia take pains to explain the reference to twenty years as including the time it took to muster the Greek army, I would be tempted to read the line “since I went from there and my dear homeland” (ἐξ οὗ κεῖθεν ἔβην καὶ ἐμῆς ἀπελήλυθα πάτρης) as going back to Helen’s marriage and including a reference to the broader world of myth. (to be clear, though, this is not an easy argument to make.
But Helen’s capacity both by her presence and her words to remind audiences of the larger arc of myth remains important regardless of how we count up to twenty. Consider again the wish she makes to have died before she left home: this wish echoes Achilles’ wish that he had never taken Briseis and multiple characters’ wish that Paris had died before he could have caused all this trouble. Epic is deeply interested in considering the causes of things. When it toys with contrafactual statements it invites audiences to consider causal chains and the interdependence of events and our notions of agency and goodwill. Here, instead of wishing for Paris’ death and ascribing him the agency for the war, Helen regrets her own existence and traces Hektor’s death to the moment she left home.
Helen’s function as a sign of the larger story helps also to explain her position in the order of the laments. Typically in early Greek rhetoric, the most important element is reserved for the final position rather than the initial ones. (Johannes Kakridis called this an “ascending scale of affection” (1949, 19-20 So, doublets tend to put greater emphasis on the second entry and tricola feature both increasing length of phrase and amplified importance. This works on the level of phrases and lines, but it also is important in larger structures as well.
The clearest parallel to help us understand the oddness of the laments at the end of book 24 are the conversations in book 6 of the Iliad. There, Hektor moves towards the most important conversation and through what appears to be greater degrees of intimacy as he speaks first to Hecuba, then to Helen, and finally to Andromache, who has the longest and most charged exchange in the book. Similarly, Hektor’s death is known last to Andromache in book 22. At the end of the epic, however, we start with Andromache, then hear from Hecuba, and finally end with Helen. The speeches are roughly the same length and, as we have already seen, are all about Hektor in a more-or-less intimate way. The difference this time, I think, is that we move from the most local, intimate relationship, steadily focusing our gaze outward, away from Hektor’s corpse to a view of the larger world. The increasing emphasis, then, is away from the parochial to the bigger picture, away from Hektor’s burial to remind us of the whole of which it is merely a representative part.
In her essay on Helen’s lament, Maria Pantelia notes that Helen’s presence and position in the laments is “problematic” in part because she is the cause of his death and the other women have been characterized as hostile to her. Pantelia notes first that Hektor’s mourning already started in 22 with speeches by Priam, Hecuba, and Andromache (and, to my taste, these speeches are more moving than the rather limited laments in 24). Following the groundbreaking work of Margaret Alexiou on mourning traditions, Pantelia suggest that those first speeches are characteristic of “spontaneous and personal expressions of pain and grief” (24) while those from 24 are similar in shape as well as size to one another.
Helen’s position as the final speaker, emphasizes a move from “the human and the personal to the universal and transcendent” (25). And this works in part because Helen herself has a unique connection to the generation of epic fame: she tells stories to confirm people’s identities in book 3; she is weaving her own story for people to come to learn about in book 6, and she contests and retells stories from the Trojan War tradition in book 4 of the Odyssey. “Helen’s lament”, Pantelia suggests, is not about what Hektor can no longer do for Troy, but about the greatness of a human being who deserves to be remembered”.
And I think it is so very important that she remembers him for his kindness, for protecting her against the anger of others. This is in a way a distinct thing about Hektor’s character: he acts for what is right no matter how much it is going to hurt him. In addition, the focus on his simple, personal glory, leaves the question of heroic renown in the dust of the burial ground. Hektor is memorialized here not as some man-killing hero, but simply as a man. While he predicts in book 7 that the future will know him by the names of the people he killed, the story Helen tells after his death is of the small kindnesses that made life easier to live.
A short bibliography
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge
Austin, N. 1994. Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca: Cornell
BLONDELL, RUBY. “‘Bitch That I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 140, no. 1 (2010): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40652048.
Carvounis, Katerina. “Helen and Iliad 24. 763-764.” Hyperboreus, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 5-10.
Due, C. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ebbott, M. 1999. "The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad" In Carlisle, M. and Levaniouk, O. eds. Nine Essays on Homer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 3-20.
Graver, M. 1995. "Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult." ClAnt 14: 41-61
Groten, F. J. 1968. "Homer's Helen.” G&R 15: 33-39.
Pantelia, Maria C. “Helen and the Last Song for Hector.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), vol. 132, no. 1/2, 2002, pp. 21–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20054056. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024.
Shapiro, Harvey Alan. “The judgment of Helen in Athenian art.” Periklean Athens and its legacy: problems and perspectives. Eds. Barringer, Judith M. and Hurwit, Jeffrey M.. Austin (Tex.): University of Texas Pr., 2005. 47-62.