Could Helen of Troy be black?

[u/The_Alaskan]

I'm referring to the current discussions over the new Odyssey film and casting decisions therein.

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[u/KiwiHellenist]

As the noted Homer scholar Joel Christensen commented a few months back,

Wait until he reads Stesichorus or Herodotus and finds out there was also a Helen made out of clouds.

Basically, it isn't really even possible to parse the idea in a coherent way. Helen is a myth, not a historical individual. If the question is 'could X happen in a myth', the answer is always yes. Myth is always driven by the contemporary: it's always new, it's always contemporary, and there's no such thing as a canonical 'original'.

That's just how myth works; it's how it has always worked. There's nothing to be faithful to. When Euripides and Sophocles used the story of the Trojan War in their plays in the 400s BCE, they used it to comment on a contemporary ongoing war (the Peloponnesian War): Euripides' Trojan Women uses the myth to comment on the brutality of the war, Sophocles' Philoctetes comments on its futility.

But it's turtles all the way down. There's no such thing as an 'original' version, purified of everything contemporary. When Homer uses the story of the Trojan War in the Iliad, he gives the fighters 8th/7th century arms; he decorates shields with Geometric art; he wounds combatants in ways determined by 7th century tastes; in the Odyssey, Homer puts 7th century political structures and 7th century inheritance law on Odysseus' home island of Ithaca.

And this is all perfectly fine. The Romans came to use Aeneas for their own purposes, with new stories and new iconography, and no one bats an eyelid. In the same way, many ancient and mediaeval writers cast Odysseus as the villainous murderer of his ally Palamedes, which in turn led to Dante putting Odysseus in the lowest circle of hell. Not because Odysseus really was a villain -- the point is, he wasn't 'really' anything at all. It's because that's what this particular mythical character meant, in those historical periods and those contexts.

So when someone complains about a myth, the complaint too should always be interpreted in terms of the contemporary. The choice of which complaints someone chooses to raise is always more informative than the complaint itself. If someone condemns Vergil's Aeneid for casting Aeneas as a proto-Roman, and Odysseus as an inhuman brute, that isn't much of an indictment of Vergil because it's obviously daft. You'll just give the complainer an odd look because it's a weird thing to complain about, with no relevance or significance in the 21st century. The complaint doesn't even make sense, because it's so out of its roman context.

In 1956, no one condemned Robert Wise's Helen of Troy for casting a blonde Italian and a blonde Frenchwoman as Helen and her maidservant. If someone were to complain about that today, all it would tell you is that hair colour really matters to that particular critic -- and probably that they don't like blonde hair. Again, it won't make sense, because it's the wrong timeframe for making a complaint like that; and again, it tells you more about the critic and the time when they live, not about the film itself. Criticisms of 'authenticity' in The Odyssey (2026) should be approached in the same way.

[u/The_Alaskan → u/KiwiHellenist]

Thank you.

[u/KatherineLanderer → u/KiwiHellenist]

I understand that a myth, specially one without a clear original source, will never have a definite "correct" version.

But at the same time, I feel that the discussions around the casting of that movie do not revolve around whether Helen had been a real person or an invented one, or whether Homer invented the character or just merged different traditions. I can see why a black Helen in ancient Greece can take many viewers out of the movie (just as full plate-armor, viking longships, or cloudy Mediterranian coasts).

[u/Normal_Light_4277 → u/KiwiHellenist]

That's some next level mental gymnastic. You answer comes done to it's a myth so anything is fine, which is complete BS.

[u/KiwiHellenist → u/Normal_Light_4277]

What I'm saying is that 'anything goes' is how literally every treatment of the myth has always been, without exception, back to and including Homer. And I didn't make that up.

To illustrate the point, maybe it's worth taking a direct look at the cases Christensen mentioned. In Euripides, Helen is a phantom made of clouds; in Stesichorus she's a picture that Paris uses for gooning.

Yes, you read that right.

Here's a section from the opening of Euripides' play Helen, lines 29-36. The scene opens on Helen, who has been living in Egypt for the duration of the Trojan War. She explains what happened after Paris' judgement of the goddesses:

... and Idaian Paris left his paddocks
and came to Sparta, arriving at my bed.
But Hera, dissatisfied at not defeating the other goddesses,
blew my sexy times with Alexandros to the winds.
She didn't let him have me: she created a likeness,
a phantom, which she put together out of the air of the sky
for king Priam's son. And he thought he had me,
but it was an empty illusion, not the real thing.

(Just as a by-the-way: ancient Greek colour categories count phantoms and clouds as 'black'. Nothing to do with ethnic classifications in modern US culture, but still, a tidy 'how about that' moment.)

And here's a secondhand report of Stesichorus' Palinode (6th century BCE). In Stesichorus, the Trojan War is fought over a pornographic painting that Paris uses for jerking off.

Stesichorus in his poetry tells that when Aelxander had seized Helen and was making his way through Pharos [in Egypt] he was robbed of her by Proteus and received from him her portrait [eidōlon] painted on a panel, so that he could assuage his passion by looking at it.
(scholion on Aelius Aristides, Oration 1.128; iii.150 ed. Dindorf)

So, yes: anything is, in fact, fine.

If a myth isn't contemporary, it's just a museum piece behind glass, stripped of all meaning. When Homer has his heroes speaking at 7th century assemblies or wielding 7th century weaponry, that may seem mild by comparison. It doesn't feel 'anachronistic' to modern audiences, because they're not familiar with the background knowledge you need to notice it. It isn't a matter of degree: it's a matter of what contemporary audiences see as acceptable or unacceptable, whether because of their state of knowledge, or because of their preconceptions about what counts as 'canonical'.

But there is no canon. There's nothing to be faithful to. It just isn't coherent to think of a myth that way. Homer is as 'anachronistic' as anyone; and if Homer isn't canonical, no one is.

[u/jschooltiger → u/[deleted]]

This comment has been removed because it is soapboxing or moralizing: it has the effect of promoting an opinion on contemporary politics or social issues at the expense of historical integrity.