Listen up, dear readers, hold on tight, because here comes one of those historical bombshells that change everything.
We all know, at least roughly, the story of the Trojan War in the version that has come down to us in Homer's Iliad, right? According to that tale, the gorgeous Queen Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus (a knockout of a woman, regarded in her day as a sort of demigoddess), falls head over heels at first sight for the young Trojan prince Paris and runs off with him without a second thought. The dashing Turkish stud (Troy sat on the western coast of modern-day Turkey) whisks her off to his city for a romantic honeymoon and to introduce her to his parents, Priam and Hecuba, without giving the slightest thought to the fact that such a treacherous, foolish and downright stupid act would send the Greeks into an almighty rage… And so, lo and behold, the Greeks, furious at the grievous insult inflicted on one of their own, within a few weeks muster a mighty armada in a coalition of various Greek cities and islands, and set off to besiege Troy for ten long years, deploying their finest and most famous warriors: the divine Brad Pitt… er, I mean, Achilles, the cunning Odysseus and the brothers Agamemnon king of Mycenae and Menelaus king of Sparta, as well as the giant Ajax the Great, Diomedes, Patroclus and the wise old king Nestor of Pylos.
The Greeks, in fact, to avenge the abduction of one of their queens, don't mess about and go to war with a whopping thousand ships, all black, crammed with hoplite soldiers armed to the teeth… Until finally, as we all know, thanks to the famous wooden horse trick dreamed up by Odysseus, they take the city and recover Helen, returning her safe and sound to her lawful husband. End of the movie. Applause, tears, standing ovation and everybody home. Sound familiar?
Well, my friends, get comfortable, because that tragic yet beautiful and oh-so-romantic story Homer the blind poet has been telling us for three thousand years could be a lie with a capital L. Or worse still: a doctored version, sold to the public like one of those Turkish soap operas — fittingly enough — to cover up what the Trojan War really was: a colossal raid-and-plunder operation, planned in cold blood well in advance.
And the man who comes to debunk the fairy tale is no modern pseudo-historian with an online podcast, oh no; the man who tells us is none other than Herodotus of Halicarnassus himself, better known as «the Father of History», who lived in Greece back in the 5th century BC.
And he tells us because he, in turn, was told in Egypt by some very important gentlemen of the time — bald, kohl-eyed priests who, it seems, had far better first-hand intel than Homer about what the hell had actually happened there a thousand years earlier.
Let's get straight to it.
Herodotus sets foot in Memphis (and is gobsmacked)
It's around the year 450 BC, more or less, and our beloved Greek historian is on the trip of his life (two long years) across Ancient Egypt. He travels the whole Nile from north to south, visits pyramids, temples and palaces, measures obelisks, calculates the perimeter and height of the biggest and most famous pyramids, interrogates every priest or important figure who crosses his path, samples weird foods (and you can bet he gets food poisoning at least a couple of times himself — all tourists get sick in Egypt and end up sprinting to the loo clutching their guts…), and jots down everything he sees and hears in his curious traveller's notebook.
At a certain point on the journey, he reaches the city of Memphis, the political and administrative capital of Pharaonic Egypt in those centuries, and goes to visit a rather curious little temple set inside a much larger sacred complex — a religious complex built some seven hundred years before Herodotus's visit and dedicated to a pharaoh whom the Greeks of that era called Proteus and who, almost certainly, was none other than the great pharaoh Ramesses II… (or perhaps, though less likely, it may have been Ramesses III, since the exact chronologies wobble quite a bit, and Herodotus, often and entirely unintentionally, tends to make a right mess of his dates).
And this is where our man's jaw hits the floor in astonishment.
It turns out that this little temple, tucked away inside the main complex, is dedicated to a foreign goddess whom the Egyptians call «Aphrodite the Guest» or also «Aphrodite the Pilgrim». And pay attention to this detail because it's hugely important: nowhere in ALL the land of the pharaohs is there another temple dedicated to Aphrodite, or to any other foreign goddess, bearing that Greek name and that particular epithet. It's one of a kind. Only this one exists. And only here.
Herodotus, itching with curiosity and sensing there had to be something juicy behind that Greek epithet, rushes off to interrogate the priests, begging them to please tell him the story of that strange nickname, and who that beautiful female statue presiding over the temple entrance might be.
And then the Egyptian priests, after playing a little (or rather, fairly) hard to get, drop the atomic bomb right in his face.
«Look, my Greek friend, I'll tell you because I like you…»
That's more or less, and paraphrasing, what the high priest says to a Herodotus who no longer knows what to do with himself from the excitement.
The statue, they explain, does not actually represent the goddess Aphrodite herself. It represents a mortal woman of flesh and blood who was hugely important in the history of Egypt during the 19th and 20th dynasties, that of the Ramesside pharaohs; so important that one of these pharaohs — supposedly the aforementioned Proteus/Ramesses II — deified her by building her this temple and placing her on a par with his goddesses Isis, Bastet, Hathor and the Greek Aphrodite herself.
And who was this foreign woman, beautiful enough to deserve a temple? Well, it seems, according to that bald kohl-eyed priest, the beauty was none other than…
Helen. The wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Semi-divine daughter of Tyndareus. The woman who supposedly ran off with Paris, the cause of the Trojan War. That very one…
That veteran, well-informed priest insisted that the beautiful Helen of Troy lived for a time in Egypt. In Memphis, to be precise, in that pharaoh's palace, throughout the whole damned Trojan War. So while Achilles and Hector were knocking the stuffing out of each other in front of the walls to avenge the death of Patroclus, two thousand kilometres away Helen was sipping Egyptian wine and barley beer, taking baths on the banks of the Nile and being treated like a proper queen by the great pharaoh. Which changes absolutely everything.
The ingredients of this soap opera: an elopement disguised as a kidnapping, an unfaithful queen and the theft of a treasure
Let's rewind the film to the very beginning to understand it properly.
According to what the priests of Memphis tell Herodotus (and let me remind you that these Egyptians had already had written archives on stone, papyrus and bronze for three thousand years) things went like this:
Back in the 12th century BC (the Trojan War is indeed dated to around 1184 BC, though there's still debate), the Trojan prince Paris and his elder brother Hector were on an official diplomatic visit to the Spartan court of King Menelaus. As was the custom back then between friendly kingdoms, Menelaus offered them lodging, food, wine, parties, girls and the whole royal VIP package, under what was then called «the sacred bond of hospitality», a very serious thing that could not be betrayed or defiled under any circumstances. So far, so good.
But it so happens that Paris (who was very handsome, but had the cunning of a sardine and the brain of an anchovy) set his eye on the one woman in the city deemed untouchable, the king's wife, the young and gorgeous Queen Helen. And she, married to a Menelaus who was rather older and rather boring, set her eye right back on the young, muscular Trojan prince who kept making eyes at her.
And this is where Herodotus slams his first fist on the table against Homer's official version. Because Homer, in the Iliad, sells us the story that Paris kidnapped Helen and carried her off to Troy by force. That the poor woman was an innocent victim of the fiery Trojan, and that the two barbarian brothers, Paris and Hector (that's how the Greeks called any non-Greek), dragged her onto the ship against her will…
And Herodotus, clutching his belly with laughter, tells us plainly: naaah, that's impossible… no bloody way did it happen like that, my friends… There was no kidnapping here, not on your nelly. What there was, was a classic elopement, seasoned with overwhelming passion and a hearty dose of wild sex, and — to top it all off — spiced with the theft of a good chunk of Sparta's royal treasure. A theft carried out by that same unfaithful and (between you and me) rather slutty wife, who took advantage of her husband's absence to jump into bed with another man, rob him and run off. Because as it happens, the cuckol… er, I mean, Menelaus, was in those days attending his grandfather's funeral on a distant island when his dear wife decided to clean out the royal coffers and bolt with her new Turkish boyfriend to the other shore of the Aegean Sea, which is what the Greeks called — and still call — their stretch of the Mediterranean.
So the freshly minted couple legged it loaded with gold, silver and jewels, and as if that weren't enough, they also took along a few Spartan maidservants loyal to the queen to make their bed for them over in Troy. The heist of the century, the whole nine yards.
But — and here comes the unexpected plot twist — the Mediterranean in that area is treacherous, and one hell of a storm, surely sent by the gods, blew them off course. Instead of reaching Troy, the lovers' ship ended up dragged by the winds to the shores of northern Egypt. And that's where the party ended for them.
Pharaoh Proteus loses his temper — and rightly so…
When Paris and Helen disembark in Egypt, they most likely do so near the port of Canopus, in the Nile Delta region, and the pharaoh's royal officers spot the foreigners immediately (nobody got in or out of Egypt without the central administration knowing; especially in the north, for fear of another Hittite invasion, they had a border control system that was pretty efficient for the era) and haul them off under arrest to the royal court of Memphis for a face-to-face with the pharaoh.
And here, Proteus (Ramesses II or III, but let's keep calling him Proteus out of respect for Herodotus's text) personally interrogates the beautiful Greek woman and the young prince Paris separately. Paris's brother Hector, who as we know was travelling with them, is never mentioned at any point in the priests' story, so we assume he managed to give the Egyptian border police the slip on the day of the capture.
Ramesses listens first to Helen's account. She, obviously, finding herself cornered and drowning in shame, bursts into floods of tears and, between sobs and very cleverly, pins the whole blame on the Turk. «Divine Majesty», Helen tells Proteus, «those two Trojan bastards must surely have drugged me or bewitched me or hypnotised me to make me go with them, because otherwise there's no explaining it… Come on, I'm the Queen of Sparta, I'd never have gone off with them, not in a million years». Ramesses, deeply susceptible to the charms of this lovely Greek woman lost in a vale of tears, melts, believes her, and embracing her tells her not to worry about a thing, that the worst of her «kidnapping» is over, that she'll stay in Egypt as his guest until her husband comes to fetch her, and that all will be well in his palace.
At the same time, however, he turns sour as hell against the boy, and when Paris walks into the hall to give his version of events, he realises at once that she has already sold him down the river to the highest bidder. Terrified, «Sir Sardine-Brain» confesses everything: that he ran off with the wife of a foreign king who was his friend and political ally, and that he did so after being received as a guest of honour in the man's own home. And that, on top of it all, he made off with a substantial chunk of the Spartan royal coffers.
Proteus flies into a rage and, shouting, lets Paris have it:
«Listen here, you utter fool, if I didn't strictly observe the sacred law of hospitality that forbids me to shed the blood of a guest under my own roof, I'd have you put to death right now in this throne room, and in the cruellest way possible. You are no man, you are a piece of filth, a disgrace to your people, to your father King Priam — who happens to be a friend of mine — and a blot upon the whole divine order. What you have done to Menelaus is one of the foulest betrayals a man can commit in this life.»
Then the pharaoh orders all his goods and the stolen treasure confiscated, and has him kicked out of the palace with the explicit order to vanish from Egypt within forty-eight hours. Otherwise, if Paris is still found in the land of the double crown two days later, he'll be beheaded.
And here comes the million-dollar question: how long did Menelaus take to learn the truth?
Let's do a couple of sums, dear readers, because the timing here is very important.
In the 12th century BC, the Greeks were formidable navigators, and so were the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. Crossing the Mediterranean southward, from the coasts of the Peloponnese to the Nile Delta, with a good ship and favourable winds, was no Sunday stroll, but neither was it the end of the world: it took on average two to three weeks, counting the necessary technical stops on the islands along the way (Kythira, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus). And the return trip took roughly the same.
So pay attention to this simple piece of arithmetic:
- Weeks 1 to 3: Paris and Helen elope, get caught by the storm and end up in Egypt.
- Weeks 3 to 4: the pharaoh captures the fugitives, interrogates them, keeps Helen, confiscates the treasure and expels Paris.
- Weeks 5 to 6: Ramesses/Proteus dispatches envoys to Sparta with the official news: «My friend Menelaus, your wife and your gold are here with me in Memphis waiting for you. Come whenever you like. My house is your house.»
- Weeks 6 to 8: the Egyptian embassy sails to Sparta and delivers the message to Menelaus.
Doing the rough maths, at most two months after the elopement King Menelaus already knew exactly where his wife and his gold were, and knew they were under the protection of a very well-known and immensely powerful sovereign.
Which means that the idea, peddled for almost three thousand years by Homer and his disciples, that Menelaus spent ten years of his life besieging Troy believing his wife was inside, was one monumental and deliberate cock-and-bull story.
So… why the hell did the Greeks go and attack Troy?
For a very simple and very human reason: money.
Let's set the scene. At the time of Helen's flight, Menelaus, his brother Agamemnon (supreme king of Mycenae and the most powerful of all the Greek kings) and pretty much every petty king of the Aegean had quite possibly been dreaming for years of a military expedition of colossal scale against Troy. Why Troy? Because Troy was at that moment the richest and most beautiful city in the eastern Mediterranean. It sat strategically on the Dardanelles strait, controlled all the maritime trade between the Aegean and the Black Sea, and charged sky-high tolls to every merchant ship that passed through. Troy, in a word, was a walking gold mine. A sort of Bronze Age Dubai, basically.
And the Greeks had been eyeing that gold mine hungrily for some time. The only thing they were missing to make their move was a pretext. A casus belli. A morally presentable excuse to invade and plunder a friendly, allied city with which they technically had no open dispute.
And then, would you believe it, Paris goes and runs off with a Greek king's wife and his treasure. Bingo! Casus belli served up on a silver platter. Honour besmirched, hospitality violated, woman stolen, gold plundered. The perfect pretext to mobilise every Greek kingdom in a sacred coalition of vengeance.
So when, two months later, the Egyptian envoys arrive in Sparta with Proteus's message, Menelaus and Agamemnon already had the whole war machine up and running, the allies summoned, the ships being built, the hoplites recruited and, above all, the future Trojan loot already counted and divided in advance among the leaders of the expedition.
Were they now going to say: «well lads, terribly sorry everyone, turns out the girl is safe and sound in Egypt, so you can put the freshly built ships away, send the soldiers home and write off the money spent on weapons, because the whole thing's cancelled»? Of course not. Not a chance in hell.
What Menelaus and Agamemnon did (and this is just a reasonable hypothesis of mine drawn from Herodotus's data) was hush up the news, pay the Egyptian envoys to keep their mouths shut, reassure Proteus with the promise of collecting Helen «once we've sorted out a little matter pending with the Trojans», and press ahead with the war they already had scheduled. The official excuse sold to the Greek people and to posterity was: «we're going to recover our queen, abducted by the treacherous Trojans». The real reason: the loot.
By the way, pay attention to a telling detail Herodotus lets slip: when the Greeks reach Troy and lay siege, the Trojans tell them, time and again, that Helen is NOT in Troy, that she never arrived, that they know she's in Egypt and that they should go to Memphis to fetch her, for God's sake.
But the Greeks turn a deaf ear. It's not that they don't know: it's that they know perfectly well and it simply doesn't suit them to admit it in public. They need to keep the fiction of the abducted woman alive to justify the attack. If at any point they openly confirmed that Helen had never been in Troy, the entire moral legitimacy of the war would collapse.
It's the oldest political lesson in the world, my friends: once an empire has decided to invade another out of greed for money, no fact of reality is going to make it change its plans. Ring any bells? Of course it does. Every war ever waged by humankind has always worked this way. From the remotest Bronze Age right up to today…
So… which of the two is right, Homer or Herodotus?
And here we come to the million-dollar question.
Which of the two do we believe? The celebrated blind Greek poet who wrote the official version two or three centuries after the events, serving as a mouthpiece for the heroic narrative that suited the Greek aristocracy? Or the great historian who travelled in person all the way to Egypt, taking notes on everything, and who interviewed the temple priests who guarded the secret archives of the Ancient Kingdom?
Herodotus, in his book, clearly takes sides and gives us several arguments in favour of the Egyptian version:
- The temple of «Aphrodite the Guest» in Memphis, in Herodotus's day, physically existed and was unique in all of Egypt. And its priests explained it by telling precisely the story of the coming of Queen Helen of Sparta. If the story were false, where did that temple come from?
- The basic arithmetic of the Mediterranean: with 2–3 weeks of sailing between Greece and Egypt, it was materially impossible for Menelaus to take ten years to find out where his wife was. If he didn't go and fetch her, it was simply because he didn't want to.
- The historical logic of the ten years of useless siege. No people on earth endures a decade of war to protect an unknown, foreign and adulterous woman. If the Trojans had actually had Helen, they'd have handed her back within months. If they didn't hand her back, it's because they didn't have her — and the Greeks knew it.
- The Egyptian archives are far more reliable than Greek oral tradition. In the 12th century BC, Egypt had already been writing things down on stone and papyrus for over two thousand years. And when Homer wrote the Iliad, the Greeks were still living in an age of oral tradition, where every bard added his own embellishment to the story.
So I'll stick with Herodotus's version — although reading Homer's Iliad has always fascinated and delighted me. And you, after reading all this, are free to decide for yourselves which version convinces you more.
My friends, on this blog and in my books we sell historical truth. However uncomfortable it may be. And we also sell, of course, a hearty dose of biting humour to help it go down nicely.
If you enjoyed this little trip to Memphis in the footsteps of Herodotus, you'll find much, much more in my book «The Book of the Muse Euterpe», the second volume of the saga «Herodotus: Histories Reloaded 2.0». There you'll find not only the full story of Helen of Troy in Egypt, but also the original Cinderella (the courtesan Rhodopis), the daughter of Pharaoh Cheops prostituted by her own father, the canal of Necho II (the first Suez, 2,500 years ahead of its time), the Hebrew Joseph nicknamed «the King of Dreams», the two craftiest thieves in history at the court of Ramesses III, the pharaoh Pheron cured of his blindness with the urine of a faithful woman, and the real chronology of the thirty dynasties that reigned over the Nile for three millennia.
Herodotus tells it to you. I modernise it, clarify it and expand it with the latest archaeological discoveries. And along the way, I make you laugh out loud.
Sources: Herodotus, Histories, Book II (chs. CXII–CXX); canonical translation by Bartolomé Pou (18th c.); Nicolas Grimal, Histoire de l'Égypte Ancienne (Fayard, 1998); Homer, Iliad and Odyssey for contrast. All the facts narrated are documented by Herodotus. The hypothesis about the economic motives of the war is a modern interpretation by the author based on Herodotus's own chronological data. The humorous remarks are the author's personal literary voice.
✠ David S. Matrecano