Helen of Troy is starting wars again. But this time the legendarily beautiful, semi-divine queen of myth, whose adulterous elopement with the Trojan prince Paris brought on the 10-year-long Trojan War, has launched a thousand tweets.
In the buildup to the release of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million, all-IMAX retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” the director revealed that he had chosen the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen. A firestorm of controversy followed, fueled largely by self-appointed guardians of the Homeric epics who consider the casting of a Black woman as Helen to be a grotesque violation — a “woke” gesture designed to “destroy Western civilization and everything that helped create it,” as one voice on X put it.
X’s owner, Elon Musk, used the platform to accuse Mr. Nolan of “pissing on Homer’s grave,” referring to the director as an “anti-White racist,” and suggesting that he chose Ms. Nyong’o in a cynical bid to win over Oscar voters. (“He wants the awards.”) Donald Trump Jr. has also complained about the casting of Mr. Nolan’s movie, wishing that Hollywood would “stop pushing this crap on us.”
“Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh declared.
Some of Mr. Nolan’s equally vocal defenders have argued that it’s silly to complain about “authenticity” when speaking of mythological figures; Helen, after all, was hatched from a swan’s egg, so how literal can we really be? A few classicists reason that Mr. Nolan’s colorblindness is in fact authentic, since the Greeks didn’t have a concept of race in the way that we do. (If they had, they surely would object to the choice to cast the open-faced, all-American Matt Damon as the wily Mediterranean Odysseus.)
Still, it seems safe to assume that Mr. Nolan’s choice of Ms. Nyong’o was meant to be pointed. The last major big-screen depiction of Helen was in the 2004 “Troy” (Donald Jr. was a fan), in which she was played by the extremely Aryan-looking German actress Diane Kruger.
So what is Mr. Nolan up to? As it turns out, the auteur is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world.
It’s worth noting that we actually have no idea what Helen looked like. Homer confines his descriptions to generic banalities — “she looked awfully like the immortal gods” — while the two visual adjectives he gives her, “beautiful-haired” and “white-armed,” are conventional and used of other female characters as well. (She is also described as “shudder-inducing”; go try to cast that.) Later authors such as the playwright Euripides introduce new adjectives, for instance, “reddish-blonde.” But on the whole, the Greeks didn’t care much what she looked like.
What they did care about was how she talked. Already in Homer’s telling, Helen is an effective and indeed seductive speaker. In the “Iliad,” she eloquently rues her mad infatuation with Paris, delivers some nice jabs in an argument with no less a debate opponent than the goddess Aphrodite and effectively has the last word in the epic, pronouncing a powerful final eulogy for the fallen Trojan hero Hector. In the “Odyssey,” she beguiles a group of dinner guests with tales of her efforts to help the Greek cause from behind enemy lines in Troy. But her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, with whom she has long since been reunited, counters with a very different tale, one in which it’s clear that she was working to betray the Greeks.
From the dawn of Greek literature, then, Helen has been at the center of an extremely self-conscious debate that, like beauty itself, is about the tension between insides and outsides: How do we know when someone is telling the truth?
Helen’s way with words made her an irresistible subject for a number of later writers. The lyric poet Stesichorus (circa 630-555 B.C.E.) wrote a poem in which he criticized her wayward behavior. In revenge, it was said, she blinded him. Soon enough he wrote a retraction, or “Palinode,” in which he defends Helen’s honor, explaining that it was merely a phantom Helen who had run away with Paris, while the real Helen, faithful and innocent, was spirited away to Egypt. Duly placated, so the tale goes, she restored his sight.
The ease with which different sides of Helen’s case could be argued appealed to the so-called Sophists of the classical period, who prided themselves on their ability to “make the weaker argument appear the stronger.” The Sicilian philosopher and rhetorician Gorgias, born in 483 B.C.E., composed an exhibition speech in which he rattled off not one but four separate arguments in favor of Helen, each one of which could effectively absolve her of any blame for her actions.
Euripides, a contemporary of Gorgias, put Stesichorus’ tale of a phantom Helen to work in a tragicomic drama that bears her name, here again in order to explore the relationship between truth and fiction, rhetoric and reality. Helen’s dilemma bears an uncanny resemblance to that of many people who find themselves embroiled in heated exchanges on social media: How do you argue the truth when the whole world has swallowed a falsehood?
And yet, in the same playwright’s “Trojan Women,” Helen appears not as a hapless victim of false rhetoric but as a canny manipulator of it. In the presence of the grief-stricken Trojan wives and mothers who have been enslaved at the end of the war she herself had started, this Helen coolly exculpates herself with a series of gallingly disingenuous arguments. (She says we should lay the blame on Paris’ mother, Hecuba, since she gave birth to him in the first place.) In the play’s dark conclusion, her sophistries get her off scot-free.
The historians, too, found in Helen a useful figure. In his sprawling account of the wars between the Greeks and Persians fought in the early 400s B.C.E., Herodotus establishes his bona fides as a historian by discounting the poets’ tall tales about Helen and Paris, abductions and seductions. In Book 2 of his “Histories,” he whizzes through a series of practical reasons that Homer’s accounts couldn’t possibly be true, concluding that “it’s impossible to think that the Trojans would have fought amidst such great disasters just for Helen.” Helen couldn’t have been in Troy, he calmly concludes, since its king, Priam, like any ruler worth the name, would surely have given her back once the casualties started piling up.
And so the woman whom we associate with great beauty was, at least for the Greeks, all talk. Both a skilled orator and the object of skillful oratory, the “real” Helen of Troy, you could argue, was a figure associated above all with profound debates about the nature of reality and the power of words, the seductiveness of falsehood and the fragility of truth. In that sense, at least, the controversy about the new “Odyssey” movie, like so many of the arguments being conducted today, connects us to the Greeks’ Helen in a far more authentic way than the choice of this or that actress could.
It seems only right to leave the last word in this debate to a woman. A lyric by Sappho (circa 630-570 B.C.E.), considered by the Greeks to be the “10th Muse,” wonderingly recounts how Helen of Troy, “considered the most beautiful by far of all human beings, abandoned her most excellent husband and sailed off to Troy with nary a thought for her child or her beloved parents.” Why ever would she do so? Because there’s no rhyme or reason when it comes to what we yearn for, no absolute standard for beauty. “The most beautiful thing on this black earth,” Sappho writes, “is whatever you happen to desire.” Whatever else the debate over Christopher Nolan’s casting has proved, it certainly shows that, by forcing people to confront — or reveal — their own often irrational notions of what is beautiful and ugly, true and false, Helen of Troy still has something to tell us.
Source images by Angela Weiss, powerofforever and duncan1890/Getty Images.
Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.” His translation of the “Odyssey” was published in paperback this spring.
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