Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore

If you're looking to find out about Helen of Troy then this is the book for you.

I read Euripides's play first and was struck by Helen's similarities to Jesus - I read it from a post-Christian perspective. This book really helped me to understand how the Greeks would have seen Helen. Hughes is actually quite profound when discussing Helen as an eidelon.

My one complaint is that the footnotes are a mixture of references and fascinating asides that should be part of the main text. There are many hundreds of footnotes so the flow of your reading is constantly interupted, often only to be told that it's ibid.

Ancient history has never been my thing, but if all ancient history books are like this one, then bring it on! Hughes paints an extraordinary picture of life in ancient Greece, focusing on the most famous name from her times - Helen of Troy. While never forgetting there is no evidence that Helen was an actual person, Hughes describes the life and times of princesses of that era and speculates persuasively on the possibility of Helen as a real person. This book, clearly written for a general audience, but never condescending or over-simplified, draws a continuous line from those ancients through history to our own times and I, for one, came away believing that a Helen of Troy certainly existed and swayed the politics and history of the show more eastern Mediterranean 3,500 years ago. show less

I loved this book. It was fairly dense, and it took me four or five weeks to get through it, but that was because there was so much information, so much detail and so much to savour on each page.

I really feel like I know so much more than I did at the start of this book (and I am not a novice to the topic either). Whilst you could tell Hughes has an academic background through her writing, I think she does a good job of not writing too drily, nor making what she is saying inaccessible.

If you are looking for a retelling of the story, then look elsewhere, but if you are looking for an in-depth discussion of the various portrayals of Helen throughout history, of the myths surrounding her as well as myriad tidbits of evidence from a wide show more range of source (archeological to legal) then this book has plenty to keep you going. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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.

Well written, mostly scholarly (but not boring) book that explores the idea, myths and mystery of Helen of Troy, what her life might have been like (archaeology stuff) and what she means to different people/times.

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 show more 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. show less