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Helen of Sparta and Her Very Own Eidolon Helen of Sparta and her very own Eidolon The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Nagy, Gregory. 2016. "Helen of Sparta and her very own Eidolon". Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/ urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. Published Version https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/helen-of-sparta-and- her-very-own-eidolon/ Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40827383 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Classical Inquiries Editors: Angelia Hanhardt and Keith Stone Consultant for Images: Jill Curry Robbins Online Consultant: Noel Spencer About Classical Inquiries (CI ) is an online, rapid-publication project of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, devoted to sharing some of the latest thinking on the ancient world with researchers and the general public. While articles archived in DASH represent the original Classical Inquiries posts, CI is intended to be an evolving project, providing a platform for public dialogue between authors and readers. Please visit http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries for the latest version of this article, which may include corrections, updates, or comments and author responses. Additionally, many of the studies published in CI will be incorporated into future CHS pub- lications. Please visit http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:CHS.Online_Publishing for a complete and continually expanding list of open access publications by CHS. Classical Inquiries is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 In- ternational License. Every efort is made to use images that are in the public domain or shared under Creative Commons licenses. Copyright on some images may be owned by the Center for Hellenic Studies. Please refer to captions for information about copyright of individual images. Citing Articles from Classical Inquiries To cite an article from Classical Inquiries, use the author’s name, the date, the title of the article, and the following persistent identifer: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. For example: Nagy, G. 2019.01.31. “Homo Ludens at Play with the Songs of Sappho: Experiments in Comparative Reception Teory, Part Four.” Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/ urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. Classical Inquiries Studies on the Ancient World from CHS Home About People Home » By Gregory Nagy » Helen of Sparta and her very own Eidolon Helen of Sparta and her very own Eidolon Share This May 2, 2016 By Gregory Nagy listed under By Gregory Nagy Comments off Edit This How do we square the idea of Helen as goddess of Sparta with the idea of Helen of Troy as we see her come to life in the Homeric Iliad? I hope to address this problem here by taking a second look at the idea of Helen’s ‘image­double’, the word for which in Greek was eidōlon. [Essay continues here…] Classical Inquiries (CI) is an online, rapid-publication project of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, devoted to sharing some of the latest thinking on the ancient world with researchers and Recovery of Helen by Menelaus. Attic black­figure amphora, ca. 550 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen. Photo: the general public. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. Introduction Editor §0. In Classical Inquiries 2016.02.18, I analyzed a scene in the Homeric Odyssey where Telemachus finds himself transported into a kind of “Mycenaean heaven” while visiting the palace in Sparta where Menelaos lives together with Helen as his wife. And I argued that the picturing of Helen as a ‘daughter of Zeus’ in this Keith Stone context is a most fitting description of a goddess who was already worshipped at Sparta in an era as early [email protected] as the second half of the second millennium BCE—an era that marks the rise and the eventual fall of an early Greek civilization that archaeologists recognize as the Mycenaean Empire. But there is a problem with this picture: how do we square the idea of Helen as goddess of Sparta with the idea of Helen of Troy as we Search for: see her come to life in the Homeric Iliad? I hope to address this problem here by taking a second look at Search the idea of Helen’s ‘image­double’, the word for which in Greek was eidōlon. Subscribe Now! Helen as goddess §1. Helen of Troy, as we know her in the Homeric Iliad, appears to be a woman, not a goddess. But the remarkable fact is—I spotlight its relevance from the start—that the Homeric Odyssey describes Helen at Subscribe to this site to receive email 4.227 by way of the epithet Dios thugatēr, which means ‘daughter of Zeus’. And I spotlight here another updates about the latest research—just relevant fact that is even more remarkable: the Homeric Iliad describes Helen as Dios ekgegauia ‘daughter of Zeus’ at 3.199, 418, and the same epithet occurs also at Odyssey 4.184, 219; 23.218. But the most one or two notices per week. remarkable relevant fact of them all is that Dios thugatēr ‘daughter of Zeus’, as we see this epithet EU/EEA Privacy Disclosures deployed elsewhere not only in the Iliad but also in the Odyssey, can be used only with reference to goddesses: Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena, Persephone, Ate, and the Muses. These and other facts to be brought up later lead me to argue that, although Helen appears to be a woman and not a goddess in the Iliad, she is still a goddess. And I argue further that, despite appearances as poetically created in the Iliad, Helen is recognized even there as a goddess. In terms of my argument, then, Helen is recognized as a goddess not only in Sparta but also in the Troy or ‘Ilion’ of the Iliad, the name of which epic means of course ‘the song of Ilion’. And she is a goddess in ‘the song of Ilion’ precisely because she is Helen of Now Online Sparta. §2. Someone may object that, even if it is a fact that you have Zeus as your father, this fact alone is not enough to make you a goddess or a god. Your mother must also be a goddess. In other words, you have to have two divine immortals as your biological parents in order to be worshipped as an immortal divinity in your own right. After all, as I myself have argued in The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (2013), the dominant gene in the genetic code of ancient Greek mythmaking is mortality while the recessive gene is immortality, not the other way around. In other words, if the family tree that produced you includes even one solitary mortal ancestor, that will be enough to make you mortal as well—no matter how many immortal ancestors grace your genealogy (H24H 0§5). So, what about Helen’s mother in Sparta? If she were a goddess, then the status of Helen as a goddess in her own right would be a given. §3. In one version of the surviving myths about Helen, the mother of Helen is in fact a goddess, named Nemesis (Cypria fragment 7 ed. Allen, by way of Athenaeus 8.334b–d). In terms of this version, then, there is no question about the divinity of Helen. But things are more complicated. There are also other versions, native even to Sparta, where the mother of Helen is not Nemesis but Leda, as we read in the wording of a Spartan song dramatized by Aristophanes in the Lysistrata (line 1314). And this Leda, as we are about to see, is a mortal woman who is impregnated by Zeus. So, I am faced with a problem here. In terms of my own argumentation concerning mortality as the dominant gene, as it were, I should expect the mortality of Leda as mother to undo the divinity of Helen as daughter of Zeus. In other words, even the paternity of immortal Zeus would not be enough to cancel the mortality of a mortal mother. §4. But Leda is no ordinary mortal mother, since her impregnation by Zeus produces not only Helen but also two sons who are twins, commonly known in English by their Latin names Castor and Pollux—Kastōr and Poludeukēs in the original Greek—who are also known as the Dioskouroi, meaning ‘sons of Zeus’ in Greek. As I will now argue, the mythological identity of Helen as a goddess at Sparta can best be understood by contemplating the mythological identity of these two brothers of hers, the Dioskouroi. Dioskouroi and dioscurism §5. In myth, the Dioskouroi are gods, but they can be gods only because they are twins. As twins, they share one­half immortality, one­half mortality. Here I introduce the term dioscurism in referring to such immortal­mortal complementarity. §6. In the myth of the Dioskouroi, the two twins are born mortal and immortal. To be more precise, Castor is born mortal and Pollux is born immortal. On one and the same night, a mortal woman named Leda is impregnated both by a mortal man named Tyndareos and by the immortal god Zeus himself, who assumes the appearance of Tyndareos while impregnating Leda. A compressed version of this myth can be found in the Library of “Apollodorus” 3.10.7. The upshot, then, is that Castor takes after the mortal Tyndareos while Top Posts & Pages Pollux takes after the immortal Zeus.
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