These are some (fanciful?) thoughts following the comments on Helen's real or apparent abduction and on V's use of Homer's Helen. I think V definitely excludes the idea that Helen was ever a victim, genuinely abducted either by Paris at the outbreak of war or seized agaist her will by Menelaus after the Fall of Troy. She is too strong a character for that kind of fate. But V does not resolve all questions about her motives. 1. The Helen of the Iliad has an air of mystery. It's not unlikely, within Homer's story, that some faction among the Trojans might disapprove of the union between Helen and Paris and might even suspect Helen's motives. One of Poseidon's speeches indicates that Aeneas sympathises with or even leads this faction. It's hard otherwise to see how Poseidon could regard Aeneas as free, as in Poseidon's view he is, of the general guilt of Troy (Il.XX, 297). V, by means of Deiphobus' speech in Aen.VI, 509, interprets Helen as one whose real motives justified all the most neurotic suspicions. She is by Deiphobus' report a ruthless double agent who surely went to Troy voluntarily, but only as part of a deep-laid plot for the city's destruction. If she has genuine sexual feeling, even love, for Paris and Deiphobus that can only be because she takes pleasure in the death of her lovers: something distinctly hinted at in Deiphobus' reference to the false joys of his last night on earth. The desire to believe in ruthless, sexy double agents may have led poor Mata Hari to her death amid the passions of another war and was thereafter exploited by film noir - also, with a new touch of comedy, by the Bond films. 2. V hesitates about this use of Helen as political villainess (as in Book VI), in that she appears differently in Book II. I tend to think that he did write the 'Helen Passage' of Book II but became dissatisfied with the violent emotion there attributed to Aeneas. But the scene with Helen and Venus is very powerfully composed and once again plays off Homer, this time off what is perhaps his most famous remark about Helen, that her face is terrifyingly like that of an immortal goddess (Il.III,158). Venus first makes reference to Helen's face and then reveals the faces of the gods. All the characters in this scene are quite close relatives and Aeneas must notice the resemblance between the face of his mother, radiant as never before, the 'hated face' of Helen, the faces of the High Gods in their most hateful form and even his own face. Homer had used Helen's unearthly beauty to suggest that in mind as well as in appearance she was closer to gods than to mortals and V is giving us the most terrifying interpretation of what that closeness means: Helen was not so much a political plotter against Troy as an instrument of the Supreme God in His providence - though this is providence in destructive (according to Austin, demonic) form. Her motive in coming to Troy would then have been her sense that the Supreme God willed her to do what she did. On the showing of this scene, the most divine of women some becomes free of human blame because of her strange communion with the gods. At the same time, the most human of the goddesses undergoes something like the human experience of losing faith in the Supreme God, whose terrifying face she reveals to Aeneas - she will never quite trust the Supreme God again. Aeneas, seeing the hateful faces of the gods, accepts that his feelings about Helen's 'hated face' were superficial (that face-related word seems appropriate). It will be his fate, as it was hers, to become the instument of the Supreme God in the great work of history and to sever himself from normal human sentiments in the process. 3. V seems to hesitate about the interpretation of Helen. He clearly decides not to set her beside Cassandra as a victim of human violence at the Fall. He doesn't decide between making her an activist and a conspirator and making her an isolated figure, whose isolation was due to her deep relationship with the gods. V doubtless reflected on what Homer really means us to think about the mysterious Helen and about Aeneas in relation to her. I think he also reflected on how different and how alike political and religious motivations are. - Martin Hughes
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