Hello! This is my first post here, and I understand if it may not be in the right place. If you have any possible suggestions, please do let me know.
I am looking for good books about Helen of Troy, Sparta (at around the same time), and the Spartan/Greek-Trojan war. I don't mind if there are multiple possibilities - just ones you believe to give reliable evidence.
I am on a history kick - I loved history at school, and now working in a bookshop I am reading more and more history I never knew existed. This has been helped along by studying Anthropology - which I appreciate is not the same thing necessarily.
I was watching the film "Troy" a few days ago. Not a great film, and I know enough that the directer/writer condensed a lot of events into three days that actually took placed over a longer period of time. I know the Illiad and Aenaid surprisingly well - I listened to the children's versions when I was younger in order to fall asleep. The film left me wondering about Helen of Troy. How old was she when she was married to Menelaus? Can her lineage be traced beyond myth? What are the sources for her beauty? Did she go willingly with Paris, did he force her, or is there another explanation?
Thank you!
Helen of Troy: The Story Behind the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (also published as Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore) by Bettany Hughes is a good place to begin. Hughes provides a fairly comprehensive historical context for the Helen myths while remaining very readable.
One of the most peculiar aspects of Aegean history is the prominence of royal women in Greek mythology (Jocasta, Helen, Clytemnestra, Pasiphaë, etc.) but their complete absence from the Mycenaean textual record. The Linear B texts refer to male figures known as the wanax ("king/lord"), but only goddesses utilized the feminine form wanassa.
Hold on. Comments like this:
Can her lineage be traced beyond myth?
suggest to me that you're under the impression that Helen--indeed, that anything in Homer--was historical. Helen is a figure in the Homeric Poems and the Epic Cycle. She is no more real than Shakespeare's Puck. The Homeric Poems were the result of centuries of oral poetry, mixing pseudo-memory with the contemporary. Finley's The World of Odysseus, while quite old now and certainly superseded as a piece of scholarship, is among the most digestible and readable treatments on the "reality" of the Homeric world. Finley was also one of the first to lay out clearly and carefully, after the discovery by Parry and later Lord the composition of the Homeric Poems as pieces of oral poetry caused a lot of stir about "ethnic memories" and other such silliness, the realities of what the Homeric Poems are actually concretely able to tell us.