The Character of Helen of Troy in the Iliad and the Odyssey

This research will examine the character of Helen of Troy in the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. The research will show that though the environment and scenario of each work are different, Homer's portrayal of Helen is consistent in each. The possibly apocryphal tradition that one blind poet, Homer, is the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey can be set beside the fact that the two epic poems, undoubtedly related by continuity of narrative, make use of a common mythic foundation that is shared by a significant literary culture. The narrative lines of one epic do not point for point complete the narrative lines of the other, although that is in general terms the case. Undoubtedly there is a difference between the Iliad and Odyssey, connected as they are, in the transformation of poetic vision from one of tragic heroism and lack of it on a grand scale to one of individual rebirth and closure (Porter 2), or from tragedy to romantic adventure (Rieu vii). The Iliad sends the Greeks abroad in the world, and the Odyssey brings at least some of them back home. The resolution of the Odyssey is generally favorable, at least for Odysseus and family, though fraught with peril all along the way.

One individual who, like Odysseus, does come home is Helen, whose legendary beauty, sometimes attributed to her being the offspring of Zeus as Swan and Leda, literally dazzles all men and whose disappearance with Paris caused all the trouble. She is a relatively minor character, appearing

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n would the Trojans have been mad enough not to give her back to the Greeks and go to war over whether Paris could live with her. The Iliad and Odyssey put the flesh-and-blood Helen in Priam's royal household for the tenure of the war and back with Menelaus at Sparta afterward. The implication in each story is that she was not raped: She is "dear child" to Priam. She calls him "dear father-in-law" when agreeing to identify various Achaean warriors in the field (Il. III). Not raped, then, but seduced: Though in the first full flush of romance she willingly went with Paris, she did experience regret, alienation, and loneliness -- as it were maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of her life. The Iliad's Helen has been described as "a shallow and self-centered woman, unconcerned with the havoc her infidelity has wrought" (Benet 436a). But this is more true of the Helen of Euripides's Trojan Women than of either of Homer's works. In that regard, Rieu (xii) says it is "difficult to recognize the characters of Homer" in other classicists' portraits of the Trojan war. Indeed, the evidence of both Iliad and Odyssey is that Helen has reflected at some length on the elopement and its consequences and that thi

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