Items related to Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore
As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject. Hesiod, a poet born around 700BC and one of the first named authors in history, called her 'the most beautiful woman in the world' and the description endured. Even though we have no contemporary representations of her, this Bronze Age princess is still seen as a paradigm of absolute beauty. Helen, '-whose beauty summoned Greece to arms, And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos' (Marlowe), has stood for three thousand years as a symbol of beauty and as a reminder of the terrible power beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek King Menelaus and the Hittite Prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for the enduring enmity between East and West. For three millennia she has been upheld as an exquisite agent of extermination. But who was she? She exists in many forms: the historical figure of the Bronze Age Spartan Queen who ruled over one of the most fertile areas of the Mycenaean world; the goddess subject of an eighth-century BC heroic cult which conflated Helen the person with a pre-Greek goddess; the mythological and literary home-wrecker figure of the Iliad; the icon and the first recorded sex-goddess, a symbol of the power of beauty and love. Focusing on the 'real' Helen (the possibility of a flesh and blood Helen), acclaimed historian Bettany Hughes re-constructs the context of life in the Bronze Age Greece for this elusive pre-historic princess. Through the eyes of a young aristocratic Mycenaean woman, Hughes looks at the social and political minutiae that would have made Helen who she was: her palaces, her slaves, her jewellery, her feasts, her games, the religious rituals she would have presided over. By combining the physical, historical and cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor, Hughes brilliantly unpacks the facts and myths surrounding one of the most enigmatic and notorious figures of all time.
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Review:
"The book triumphantly reclaims Helen from some of her traducers. Hughes' portrait is as close to a real, living Helen as we are likely to get" -- David Honigmann Financial Times 20051001 "Passionate and eccentric" -- Tom Holland The Sunday Times 20051002 "Full of fascinating detail" -- Michael Arditti Express 20051014 "Bettany Hughes, already highly and widely acclaimed for her outstanding television histories of the Spartans and many others, now bids fair to prove that the female of the species is more readable than the male historian. Her multi-faceted, multi-hued, and multi-period portrait of la Belle Helene will capture the imagination of professional scholars and general readers alike. I cannot recommend it too strongly." -- Professor Paul Cartledge, Head Of Classics, Cambridge University "This book puts Helen of Troy at the centre of a world in which as Bettany Hughes convincingly explains, the primordial power was female" -- Geraldine Bedell Observer 20051016
Book Description:
A major new book about the life and legend of the world's 'most beautiful woman' - by popular star of TV history, Bettany Hughes.
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- ISBN 10 0224078453
- ISBN 13 9780224078450
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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