Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore

Hughes tries to do a little too much in this work, melding the possible historical princess of Sparta, who would have been married off as a preteen, with the intensely sexual vision of Helen in later art and literature.

Bettany Hughes was made an honorary Fellow of my university in the same ceremony as I became a graduate, so I've been planning to read this ever since. That, and the story of Troy has always been fascinating to me. There's definitely something very compelling about Bettany Hughes' writing, which though very detailed isn't dry -- or maybe I just have a weakness for descriptions of "sumptuous palaces" and so on trained into me by my early love of a book describing the treasures of Tutankhamen's tomb. She makes the book colourful, anyway. And from whatever I know of Greek history and myths, she chooses her material well and does wonders in digging through the evidence of millennia to look at the idea of Helen of Troy, where she came from and what she has meant to generations of people.

I think my favourite section was actually the discussion of what the fabled Helen had to do with Eleanor of Aquitaine: the interaction of real queens with figures of legend like Helen of Troy, Queen Guinevere and female Christian saints fascinates me...

I'm not sure how well I think the information was organised, though. Admittedly, Helen is hard to pin down, but I'm not sure I can pinpoint how Hughes wanted to present her ideas. For me, reading cover to cover and for pleasure, it worked fine, but if I were to come back and try to refer to some specific point, I think I'd have trouble finding it.

There are extensive notes and a long list of references to other works, so all in all I think this book is very well organised and researched. And -- to me, more importantly -- I really enjoyed reading it. ( )

This is a weighty erudite tome covering, as other reviewers have said, more than just the bronze age greek origins of Helen. I expected it to be slow going and a hard read. It wasn't, it was almost in the "un-put-down-able" category. I can't comment on the accuracy of the book all I can say is that it chimes with what little I do know and that having read the book I now know a great deal more.

Yes I enjoyed it, but it was a bit overlong and repetitive. Wonderfully researched though and worth reading the whole book just to be brought up short in the middle of a lengthy analysis of the history and myth of Helen by the phrase " Aphrodite acts as Helen's fluffer".

I read this immediateley after reading Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff, and enjoyed it much more. Both iconic female characters from the ancient world, and although much, much more is known for sure about Cleopatra (after all, she was definitively real)lots is unknown about both. But wheras Schiff the journalist slips into Terry Devlin mode every time she discusses unknown areas of Cleopatra's life, with Huighes she either puts the bones of her research on show and/or makes a stylish segue into myth and legend.

All the chapters are very short and most are very self contained, so it did look a bit like she had got all her students to write essays and then cobbled them together, with the left over bits dropped into the appendices.

Good read though. ( )

When I first started this wonderful book by Bettany Hughes, I was disappointed that it was not specifically just about the Bronze Age world that the real or mythic Helen occupied, and concerned that Hughes’ would be hawking a simplistic feminist thesis of the centrality of Helen to Western Civilization.

In fact, in this long, well written and richly detailed work, I was delighted to be proven wrong.

Hughes has devoted significant serious scholarship to the study of Helen as a potential historical character as well as noting probably every instance where Helen appears as a mythic character, as well as noting probably every reference to Helen in literature, popular culture or even vague allusion for the last three millennia.

This is a multi-disciplinary approach that reaches across the lines between history and archaeology and anthropology and myth and poetry and literature and – well, everything – to deliver as definitive of a treatment as I believe could ever be possible of Helen of Troy. This could never hope to achieve the author’s aims if Hughes was not simply a true academic scholar who footnotes everything, but also a truly outstanding writer of a magnificent narrative. It was only in reading the second half of this thick tome that I came to appreciate what her goals were and likewise to credit her with accomplishing these in this fine work.

If you think it is stretching a thesis to suggest that Helen pervades our culture long after Homer, long after classical Greece and ancient Rome, be prepared to discover Helen as a central character again and again, even in most unlikely places like the musings of medieval monks and on the stage of Elizabethan London.

I learned so much from this book – not only about the Bronze Age and archaic world I initially sought to further explore -- but about so many other seemingly unrelated aspects of history and western civilization, that I will without hesitation recommend this book to all with even the most peripheral interest in the subject. You will not regret it. ( )