Item Infomation
| Title: | What on earth did Helen ever see in Ajax, her former suitor? |
| Publisher: | Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies |
| Description: | In our Homeric Iliad, there is a scene, traditionally known as the Teikhoskopiā or ‘View from the Walls’, where Helen of Sparta, described here as daughter of Zeus, is looking down from where she is standing, high up on the walls of Troy, and, as we view her, she in turn is viewing from up there, from her lofty vantage point, the leaders of the Achaeans who are assembling down below at ground zero, beneath the towering walls that loom overhead. Helen’s new father-in-law, Priam, king of Troy, is also standing up there on the walls of Troy, right next to her, and we hear him calling out to her, asking her to identify, in sequence, three Achaean leaders whose looks catch his kingly eye. Helen will know each one of these leaders spotted by Priam, who presumes that she must have seen each one of them with her own eyes back when—back when she was still at home in Sparta. Prompted by Priam, Helen the eyewitness identifies for the king each one of the three Achaean leaders, one by one. But why on earth did Priam presume that Helen knew each one of these Achaeans? Before now, how on earth could she ever have seen with her own eyes all three of them? The answer is straightforward: she had seen each one of them at least once before, back home in Sparta, and in fact she had also seen there practically every other Achaean leader whom she now sees here beneath the high walls of Troy. She had seen them all at one single grand event. It happened back when… when a mass of Achaean leaders, not just these three, converged on Sparta to compete for the prize of winning Helen as bride—as the most eligible of all brides, daughter of Zeus that she was. The competition had been arranged by her would-be mortal father Tyndareos and by her semi-immortal twin brothers, Kastor and Polydeukes. The event is narrated in the Hesiodic Suitors of Helen, the bare outlines of which I introduced in the previous essay I posted for Classical Inquiries (Nagy 2021.06.14, linked here). But now, in the present essay, I shift the perspective, from the Hesiodic Suitors of Helen to the Homeric Iliad as we know it, where we can view the suitors of Helen through Helen’s own eyes. The illustration I have chosen for the essay here takes a close-up of those most perceptive eyes. And I find it most relevant here to ask myself a general question: do the perceptions of Helen in “our” Iliad match the perceptions of “our” Homer? My motive for asking such a question derives from my previous essay, where I noticed that the eligibility of Ajax, one of the main suitors of Helen in the Hesiodic Suitors of Helen, has been downgraded in “our” Homeric Iliad. And, as it happens, Ajax is one of not three but now four former suitors of Helen whom she will describe, picturing them through her celestial eyes. And here I follow up on the general question I asked a moment ago by asking something much more specific, something that centers on the main topic of this essay: What on earth did Helen ever see in Ajax, her former suitor? The Classics Version of Record |
| URI: | http://lib.yhn.edu.vn/handle/YHN/437 |
| Other Identifiers: | Nagy, G. 2021.06.21. "What on earth did Helen ever see in Ajax, her former suitor?" Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37370840 Nagy, G. 2021.06.21. "What on earth did Helen ever see in Ajax, her former suitor?" Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/what-on-earth-did-helen-ever-see-in-ajax-her-former-suitor/. |
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