Was Helen of Troy Black?

Maybe we should ask if Odysseus was Nordic.

I don’t want to engage in a stupid argument about the race of a mythical figure like Helen of Troy, but since conservatives are making a big deal of a Black woman being cast as Helen in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, there are a few things I can say about it. According to legend, Helen was fathered by Zeus.

Did Zeus have a race? Well, consider this: Helen was conceived when Zeus disguised himself as a swan and had sex with Leda of Sparta. In some versions this involved rape and in others seduction, but in either case the story implies that Zeus could appear anyway he wanted, as a man or a swan, and presumably as a Greek, Black or any other color of person. Does it makes sense to say he had a “true” human appearance?

As for Leda, she wasn’t actually from Sparta but Aetolia, a region of west-central Greece situated north of the Gulf of Corinth. She would have most likely been raised in the castle of Pleuron, where her father King Thestius resided. She was unambiguously Greek and remained so even after she was married to King Tyndareus of Sparta.

Therefore, her daughter, Helen of Troy was half-Greek. But did she appear to be Greek?

Well, we can rule one thing out. King Tyndareus fully knew that Helen was not his biological daughter and that she was of divine origin. This is why the legend says that he adopted her and worried that marrying her off to one of her Greek king suitors would arouse jealousy and war.

In an attempt to avoid this, and on the advice of Odysseus, Tyndareus made every suitor swear a sacred oath: they would all respect whichever husband was chosen, and they promised to unite and defend that husband if anyone ever tried to steal Helen away.

This is why when Paris carried her off to Troy, the Greek kings united to reclaim her.

However that may be, we can’t say that Helen’s appearance was so unremarkable that she must have looked Greek. What we do know is that her beauty was so striking that it signaled divine parentage, even to Tyndareus. She did not look “normal.”

But it’s highly doubtful that she looked Black. Homer referred to her as leukōlenos (fair-armed) and kalliparēos (fair-cheeked). Both indicated that she was a noble woman who did not work in the sun like slaves and laborers.

For these reasons I cannot fully agree with my old boss, Paul Glastris (a proud Greek-American) when he writes, “A Black Helen of Troy is hardly more of a stretch than a man of English and Nordic descent, Matt Damon, playing Odysseus.”

I’d say the casting of Damon is less of a stretch than the casting of Lupita Nyong’o, a Kenyan, as Helen, if only because Homer’s description of Helen doesn’t fit.

But Glastris makes an excellent point. Damon does not look Greek, and it is highly unlikely that a real-life Odysseus would have resembled Damon.

Also, consider this. In the late Bronze Age, you would have been significantly more likely to encounter Black Africans (referred to by later Greeks as Aithiopes or Ethiopians) than Nordics (Northern/Scandinavian Europeans) in Greek ports like Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns or Pleuron. As for inland Sparta in this era, it had diplomatic relations with Egypt which employed Black Africans in its administrative, diplomatic, and military ranks.

While both Blacks and Nordics were small minorities compared to the overwhelming majority of Mediterranean inhabitants (Greeks, Minoans, Canaanites, Cypriots, and Egyptians), geopolitics, maritime logistics and geographical trade networks favored contact with Africa far more than Scandinavia or Britain.

So, in other words, Greeks were far more likely to encounter people who looked like Nyong’o than people who looked like Damon. In this sense, Nyong’o’s appearance would have been less out of place.

On the other hand, everything about Helen’s appearance was “out of place.” Her appearance was so unusual that it could only be explained by divine parentage. One way to signal this is not to find the most beautiful Greek woman in the world and cast her as Helen, but to cast someone who has a totally non-Greek kind of beauty.

Once you make that choice, a Kenyan is no less plausible than an East Asian or a Northern European. The freakout over Nyong’o is simple racism.

Finally, this is a Bronze Age myth we’re discussing. These people are not verified individuals like Sophocles and Thucydides. Homer wrote about the Trojan War 400-500 years after it allegedly took place. In the interval, the region went through a massive decline or Dark Age in which writing and literacy largely vanished. He did not have written histories to consult, let alone WikiPedia. In this sense, it’s ludicrous to spend much time arguing about the historical accuracy of his depictions of these characters, as to their appearance or even their existence.

Like all myths, the purpose was a blend of moral teaching and explanation for how we got here and why we are the way we are. When we retell the story of Odysseus in our own time, it should serve the same purpose. We’re not in same place as the initial audience for Homer’s work, so we will of course interpret it through a different lens.

Glastris points out that our frame of reference is more than century of disastrous war, beginning with World War One. Naturally, we are not in the mood to glorify war.

This worldwide, century-long effort to hem in civilization-threatening forms of warfare is a manifestation of enlightenment, not wokeism. Nor is it wholly modern. It is one of the underlying themes of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of The New Testament.

For Nolan to have made a film in which pillage and butchery were simply part of the fun would be like someone today making a movie about the antebellum South that celebrated working Black people to death, raping women, and selling children.

This is in response to a second conservative criticism of the movie, namely, that Odysseus is portrayed as weak and “woke.”

This is, I suppose, too much in contrast to the testosterone-supplement-fueled “war-fighters” favored by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who cast all moral qualms about the victims and consequences of war to the side.

The polls indicate that the American public doesn’t currently see war that way. I suspect Glastris is right that that the public will see The Odyssey “as a warning about the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s abandonment of international norms, double-crossing of allies, and performative machismo.”

It’s a lesson as old as the Bronze Age, but told for us. This is how myths are supposed to operate.