“What it means,” I said, smiling, “is that you and I have just seen either the world’s most unmistakable omen or the world’s most nearsighted eagle.” May the gods stand by us, I thought as I laughed and Milo stared at me in dismay. May they favor and guide us, but may they never hold us hostage through our fears.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him, wiping sea spray from my eyes. “I haven’t said anything wrong. I love the gods and honor them, but I’m not their slave. Neither are you. From now on we’re going to make our own omens.” I took his hand, and when he pulled it away, I took it again. This time he let me.
We were free.
SOMETHING ABOUT HELEN
People have always loved stories. We love them, and when we find one about the adventures of a truly fascinating character, we hate to see it end. For every storyteller who concludes his tale with “And they lived happily ever after,” there’s always someone in the audience who says, “Great, and then what happened?”
Sometimes there is nothing more to tell. The dragon is slain, the war is won, the world has been saved from Evil, the main character has fallen off a cliff and died, for heaven’s sake! After all that, how can there possibly be a “then what happened?”
Never underestimate the power of an eager audience, or the desire of a storyteller to keep that audience happy. There can always be another dragon to slay, another war to fight, another world to save, and as for those characters who died at the end of the first story…well, it was all a dream, or a trick, or a case of mistaken identity. The sequel will go on!
But what about when the climax of the original story is so awesome that the sequel falls flat because “and then what happened?” is a letdown by comparison? Sometimes it’s better to have no sequel instead of a lame one. (Though you can always try telling the story of one of the original tale’s supporting characters. Spin-offs have been around since long before TV sitcoms, but I don’t know if Homer would have liked to think of the Odyssey as a spin-off of the Iliad.)
Never mind, all’s not lost. When a favorite character reaches the unmistakable end of his or her adventures and there’s honestly zero chance for coming up with further exploits that are believable and interesting, there’s something left to tell: “Well then, what happened before that?” Which is just what I asked myself before I began to write about Helen of Troy.
I wanted to tell more of Helen’s story than the best-known version, the one that’s come down to us in the Iliad. Did she know that everyone agreed that she was the most beautiful woman in the world? Did knowing that make her feel proud, or smug, or embarrassed, or bored with all the never-ending compliments? (“Yes, yes, I know I’m gorgeous, but what I asked you to do was please pass the olives!”) Did she like being thought of as nothing more than The Beautiful One? Did she worry about who she’d be when she got old and her beauty faded away? Was she just another (spectacularly) pretty face, or was there more to her than that? Who was Helen?
Daughter of the king of Sparta, she was so beautiful that it was said she couldn’t possibly be an ordinary woman and that her real father was Zeus, king of the Greek gods. What did a story like that imply about her father or her mother? Did Helen mind hearing her real parents whispered about in that way?
The Trojan prince Paris fell in love with her at first sight, stole her from her husband, Menelaus, and carried her off to his father’s walled city. Was it true love, or was it the work of the gods? Did she go with him willingly, or was she kidnapped? If she didn’t want to leave Sparta, did she ever try to get away from her kidnapper? Did she even believe she had the chance of succeeding if she tried to rescue herself?
Menelaus’s brother, King Agamemnon of Mykenae, rallied an army led by the greatest kings and heroes in Greece and fought for ten years to reclaim her. Countless men died in battle, the great city of Troy was destroyed and its people slaughtered or enslaved, all because of one beautiful woman. When it was over, Paris was dead and Helen was given back to her husband. The end of her story makes her sound like nothing more than a pretty prize to be awarded to the winner of the Trojan War. Was she heartbroken, furious, frightened, relieved, or did she feel anything at all?
And so she went home to Sparta with Menelaus, which is more or less where Helen’s story ends, as far as the Greek writers were concerned. (“Hey, Helen! You just caused a ten-year war and the destruction of one of the world’s mightiest cities! What are you going to do now?” “I’m going to Disney World!”)