#Bettany Hughes

[blackswaneuroparedux]

In the ancient stones, we find the whispers of civilisations long gone, their stories etched in the enduring embrace of rock and stone.

Bettany Hughes

[the-good-spartan]

The Rites dedicated to Helen at Sparta

So I've been re-watching a section of the Bettany Hughes documentary about Helen of Sparta (here), and I just have thoughts that I have to let out, for the purposes of getting my own ideas in order.

I'm preparing to write a scene based on these rites, so they're uppermost in my mind right now.

This is my own transcription of what Hughes says in the documentary:

The Greeks told stories of how Helen would come to the banks of the Eurotas to dance all night with other young girls. Centuries later these dances were re-staged in some kind of attempt to capture the spirit of Helen. And we still have fragments of the poetry the girls sang together*. These rites are vital to understanding Helen's appeal. The gift she is giving the girls isn't beauty but what the Greeks call kharis[...] the root of our word charisma, and it can simply mean grace. But it also has an erotic connotation. By invoking the spirit of Helen, the young girls are learning to become charismatic, sexually aware, and certainly these rituals would have been highly charged affairs. They were [there] alone together all night, there was drinking, and torchlight, and they danced naked until dawn.

(* The maiden-song is at 31:15. As no source is provided in the documentary, I have yet to find the source itself. I will update this post should I find it. Another maiden-song can be read here, though.)

Point by point then:

I truly don't know why anyone would argue that beauty wasn't at least amongst the gifts the girls went to Helen for during these rites, even if that isn't mentioned explicitly in the few fragments of poetry we have to go on. To my knowledge, it's the only attested reason to worship her [Herodotus, Bk. 6.61.], so it's illogical to discount it.

To be clear, I don't speak Greek, modern or ancient, but everywhere I've looked, kharis is defined as grace predominantly, just as Hughes says, but wikipedia did give me the additional words beauty, elegance, and charm. The only place I could find reference to anything hinting at an overtly sexual definition (if you squint and look at 'attraction' with the eye of faith) was at the website Baring the Aegis, which is a website dedicated to modern Hellenic Polytheism.

There, it's said:

Kharis is an important word. It means everything from beauty to joy, delight, kindness, good will, grace, favor, benefit, boon, charm, attraction, appeal, elegance, gracefulness, pleasure, cheerfulness, wit, gratitude, thankfulness and gratification. It's the name of a Goddess as well; the Goddess of Grace and Beauty.

It feels like a stretch to imply that there's anything sexual about the gift of kharis in the specific setting of a group of young girls dancing together, even if there is an erotic undertone to that word in some instances... Unless, that is, we look at it the details of the rite as Hughes presents them purely through a modern western lens.

Suggesting that a group of young girls being naked together is inherently sexual is so western it slaps you in the face. It's quite obvious from our sources that nudity was acceptable at Sparta in a way that many modern scholars seem to find it very difficult to accept. I addressed this a little here, but in brief, for example - we're told that young girls exercised naked together - though scholars argue over it, the texts don't leave that open to interpretation - they use the same word for the girls' exercise as they do for the boys, literally, exercise in the nude. Girls are also said to have marched naked in public parades where the boys were present.

There's as good a grounds to suggest that everyone might have been naked in public fairly regularly, at least during the hotter months, as there is to suggest that your average Spartan would've found nudity inherently sexual, weird, uncomfortable, or especially gendered.

I don't for a second believe these girls would've been alone and unsupervised, when Sparta was to its core a surveillance state. No one went anywhere without being watched over - especially during the classical period when there was the ever-present danger of helot uprisings. They were hardly likely to allow a group of young girls into the night without any guardians going with them. If nothing else, surely there would've been priestesses/female elders to guide the girls on what was required to ensure the rites were executed correctly and to the satisfaction of the gods/Helen herself.

Further to that - the idea that drinking wine implies 'something sexual is bound to happen' is also misguided, in my opinion. It's incredibly unlikely that the girls would've been drinking enough to get drunk, when even Spartan men were debarred from drinking to excess. Even if we assume they hadn't drunk wine before, which may or may not have been true, they aren't going to be falling down in a wine induced orgy after a shared kylix.

And torchlight being sexy? That's like saying when we flick on the light switch in modern times, sex must be on the cards. It was literally just their lighting.

So yeah. I just think this is one of those examples of a scenario that should be labelled fantasy rather than fact and perhaps not be inserted into a documentary without more preamble. Of course my version is much less exciting - but unfortunately, reality (at least as much as we can reconstruct it now) tends to be like that when you go looking for it, especially where Sparta is concerned.

[Also, I am once again putting this into the cosmos: documentary makers should be required to site their sources. If a YouTube essayist can do it, so can they.]

[joyinlov]

“The ancients understood that desire is worthy of respect. Human relations of all kinds are hard. The life story of Aphrodite from prehistory to the present, invented by human minds, can help us to decode human desire a little to make it our ally, not our undoing.”

-Bettany Hughes, Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire

[autumncrowcus]

“Do you not see what a great goddess Aphrodite is? She whom you can neither name nor measure, how great she is by nature from how great a thing she comes through. She nourishes you and me and all the mortals. And as proof, so that you might not only comprehend this in words, I will show you by deed, the strength of the goddess. On the one hand, earth desires rain when the dry barren ground is in need of moisture on account of drought and on the other hand the revered sky when it is filled with rain by Aphrodite desires that it fall on the earth; and when the two mingle into the same thing, they beget everything for us and at the same time they nurture everything through which the mortal race lives and grows.”

Euripides, fragment 898K, from an unidentified play, trans. Collard and Cropp, quoted in Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire, by Bettany Hughes;

[26lettersandmanyjourneys]

27.02.2023

I recently saw a show with Bettany Hughes on TV and remembered I had this book... so I better read it now before I forget again

[itmocca]

The Nile: Egypt's Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 1

The Nile: Egypt's Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 1 - Bettany visits the Nile's mouth, before boarding a dahabiya, a passenger boat used on the Nile, that will take her upstream. #history #nile #egypt

The Nile: Egypt’s Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 1 – Bettany visits the Nile’s mouth, before boarding a dahabiya, a passenger boat used on the Nile, that will take her upstream. South of Cairo she explores some tunnels under a collapsed pyramid to find the earliest hieroglyphic writing.     On board a timeless dahabiya cruise boat, the historian sets off on a 900-mile adventure up the…

[djohnhopper]

NEW BOOK: Just arrived from Amazon. Elaine got me Bettany Hughes Helen of Troy as a surprise gift. I am such a big fan of Bettany, big fan of Ancient Greece, big fan of Helen. Feeling loved. Great reading ahead!

[princelysome]

A wonderfully informative and entertaining book, it provides millennia of history and an abundance of details to flesh out the story.

[nathalieskinoblog]

David Copperfield 1935 - 2019

[thekenobee]

(IRL) Couples that make me believe in LOVE->

Jennifer Connelly & Paul Bettany

Allegra Riggio & Jared Harris

Steve & Nancy Carell

Hugh Jackman & Deborra-Lee Furness

See numbers 1-4

[the-good-spartan]

This documentary about Helen of Troy (or Sparta, as you like) is quite good. Obviously feminist in its bias - but worth watching.

One small point though - there's no evidence that I've ever seen that the Spartans sacrificed to Eros before battle.

They sacrificed before crossing every border on the way to battle, and they sacrificed before every battle - but to Eros? I don't know where she pulled that from. Aphrodite in her warlike aspect, quite possibly, but Eros?

I wish these kinds of programs were required to give sources for their claims.

[ladyinthebluebox]

in my watching the most outlandish documentaries about history era again. they are definitely my guilty pleasure...

[autumncrowcus]

“…the emperor Hadrian built a temple to Venus at Golgotha—the Place of the Skulls—in Jerusalem, matching that which he had built for Venus and Roma Aeterna on the Velian Hill in Rome in AD 135. Hadrian was specifically using Venus’s dark magic to drown out the resonance of the cave where the Jewish rebel Jesus had been buried.”

-Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire, by Bettany Hughes

[girlfromenglishclass]

"As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for close to 3,000 years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek king Menelaus and the Trojan prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. For millennia she has been viewed as an exquisite agent of extermination. But who was she?

Helen exists in many guises: a matriarch from the Age of Heroes who ruled over one of the most fertile areas of a Mycenaean world; Helen of Sparta, the focus of the cult that conflated Helen the heroine with a pre Greek fertility goddess; the homewrecker of the Iliad; the bitch-whore of Greek tragedy; the pinup of romantic artists."

- Forward to Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore by Bettany Hughes

[itmocca]

The Nile: Egypt's Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 4

The Nile: Egypt's Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 4 - The historian reaches the southernmost stretches of the Egyptian Nile #history

The Nile: Egypt’s Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 4 – The historian reaches the southernmost stretches of the Egyptian Nile, though her 900-mile journey is not quite over as she joins archaeologists as they extract a giant stone message board from the foundations of the temple of the crocodile god Sobek. Bettany also visits a hotel once frequented by Churchill and says farewell to her…