Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective by Lowell Edmunds (review)

In this learned and wide-ranging book, Lowell Edmunds subjects the much-studied figure of Helen of Troy to a different kind of analysis, one that draws on folklore studies and numerous international examples (forty, collected in appendix 1, from Iceland to Africa to China, from ancient Egypt to modern Native Americans) of a motif he calls “the abduction of the beautiful wife.” Although no single one of these tales offers all, or even most, of the specific elements of the Helen story as told in Homer, they enable Edmunds to construct what he calls a “syntagma,” or nucleus of three motifs that comprise the “Abduction”: a supernatural wife carried off by a human abductor (Paris) and then rescued or recovered by her human husband (Menelaos).

Edmunds argues that his model is more illuminating than what he refers to as the three hypostases of Helen that have dominated earlier scholarship: Helen as a goddess of cult; as an Indo-European avatar; and as a “self,” that is, as a woman with a set of individual characteristics drawn from a poet’s imagination. His model obviates the debate about the now-outdated notion of Helen as a “faded goddess” or a vegetation divinity. Referring to recent work in archaeology and Greek religion, Edmunds accepts that Helen was indeed a heroine of cult, but stresses that these cults, whether in Laconia, on Rhodes, or in Attica, are local phenomena. There is no panhellenic Helen as heroine, and Edmunds argues persuasively that no ancient source offers definitive proof that Helen was ever regarded as a goddess.

The structure of “Abduction” also helps Edmunds make clear that the Trojan story is fundamentally different from that other enlèvement (to use Lily Ghali-Kahil’s term) of Helen by Theseus when she was still a girl. This leads Edmunds to an analysis of the Dioskouroi, who rescued their sister. These twins do, of course, have a good Indo-European parallel in the Vedic Asvins, while no etymology of Helen’s name as IE, or anything else, can be considered firmly settled.

Although Edmunds’ chief purpose and most original contribution to the literature on Helen is the “comparative perspective” of the title, the book will also be mined by scholars interested in any aspect of Helen in myth, poetry, and cult. For, quite apart from the folklore angle, Edmunds offers the most detailed examination of the Helen myth and its literary manifestations now available. The book is a masterpiece of Quellenkritik, scrutinizing every ancient source for every detail of the myth and, where needed, weighing its modern commentators and interpreters. Nor does Edmunds ignore the iconographical sources, including a convenient chart of some seventy-five works of Greek art down to the late fifth century that track Helen’s life story somewhat more coherently than the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae. The bibliography is vast and wide-ranging, though I missed a reference to Norman Austin’s delightful book Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca 1994).

Edmunds’ intellectual curiosity also takes him into areas of the reception of Helen that will be much less familiar to classicists. Thus, his chapter “Helen in the Fifth Century and After” takes the reader through the most familiar appearances of Helen in Pindar, Herodotus and Thucydides, Gorgias and Isocrates (Euripides’ Helen and Trojan Women have already been mentioned in several contexts, but are not given any kind of systematic treatment). But then Edmunds moves into more esoteric territory, including unexpected occurrences of Helen in Pythagorean doctrine in Magna Graecia and in the Gospels’ false messiah Simon Magus. An excursus on Goethe’s Faust takes us out of antiquity altogether, but with a thread of continuity from Simon Magus to the magician Doctor Faustus and from the phantom Helen of Stesichoros and Euripides to Goethe’s mystical vision of her.

A short section cannot...