HERCULES: Scenes from an Heroic Life
by Alastair Blanshard
Granta £14.99 pp336

In Greek mythology, the intrusion of the divine into the human world was invariably portrayed as rape. The sexual appetites of Zeus, the king of the gods, were insatiable, and there is nothing in the whole catalogue of his adulteries with mortal women but a series of often literally animal violations. Zeus’s sperm was a miraculous and alarming substance, and so it is no surprise that the offspring of these assaults should have been hailed as heroes, miraculous and alarming too. Greatest of them all was Hercules, he of the 12 labours, and so favoured by his father that he was transfigured, upon his death, into a god. Yet even his immortality was cast into shadow by that of Zeus’s only mortal daughter — for “it is the nature of things,” as the Athenian orator Isocrates ar-gued, “that beauty should predominate over strength”.

Helen, her arms as milky white as the egg from which she was hatched, was the last of Zeus’s children, and the most fatal. Her legacy would be a world at war, and the obliteration, not merely of Troy, but of the whole age of heroes. With her conception, it was as though the patterns of history itself had been raped.

No wonder that Hercules, the strongest man in the world, and Helen, the most beautiful woman, should both have proved themselves so timeless.

Archetypes though they are, it is the aura they have of something uncanny that best explains their enduring appeal. Two new books, both cast as biographies, trace the sense of mystery that has clung to these mythic figures from classical times through to the modern day. True, as Alastair Blanshard points out in his wide-ranging life of Hercules, the muscle man was the most adored of all the heroes precisely because he seemed to the Greeks so rumbustiously human. Certain episodes of his life — whether the knockabout comedy of Zeus’s seduction of his mother, or his spell as a transvestite slave to the Queen of Lydia — were the stuff of farce rather than tragedy. Yet always, accompanying him, there is the whiff of danger. “It is no accident,” Blanshard writes, “that the adjective for describing the most gigantic, excessive, prodigious things that we can comprehend is ‘Herculean’. Hercules stands at the boundaries of our imagination.” And for ill as well as good.

Hercules may have been the ancient world’s premier monster-fighter — but he was also a violent drunkard, a serial wife killer, a father who slew his own children. Fitting, then, that he should be portrayed, in Blanshard’s biography, as a thing of nightmare as well as wonder. The result is an acute and often witty study of an enduring figure in European culture, and one that succeeds in raising fascinating questions about our notions of masculinity.

Paradox, of course, is even more evident in our attitudes towards Helen. Object of the world’s longing, she is also held responsible for the slaughter of the Trojan war. Did she flee with Paris of her own free will, or was she, as her mother had been, the victim of a brutal rape? Nobody can be sure. As Bettany Hughes convincingly demonstrates in her new book, this uncertainty reflects a much broader ambivalence towards the ideal of female beauty. Like a latter-day Menelaus, Hughes pursues her quarry wherever she can track her down, and shows that universally, whether in classical, Renaissance or modern times, what has made Helen desired has made her hated and feared as well. Even the attempt to imagine her results in sure frustration. Hughes cites a painting in the Louvre, in which Zeuxis, a Greek artist, is attempting to illustrate the face that launched 1,000 ships. What dominates it, however, “is the bleak, virtually empty canvas in the centre of the composition. This is where Helen should be: a void that Zeuxis is desperately, abortively, trying to fill”.

Yet even as Hughes acknowledges that her subject must inevitably be faceless, she is engaged upon an equally quixotic project of her own: nothing less than to demonstrate that a bronze-age queen, “rich, influential, hallowed”, was the prototype for Helen. The study of her “as a real character from history,” Hughes complains, “has been consistently neglected”.

Yet there is a simple reason for this: there is not a shred of contemporary evidence, not a scrap, that Helen ever existed. True, we have Homer — but he was writing, at the earliest, in the eighth century BC, centuries after the presumed date of the Trojan war. Use The Iliad as evidence for the life of a real Helen, and one might as well use Chrétien de Troyes to assert the existence of Sir Lancelot.

Which is not to say that the history of the bronze age is a total blank. What evidence there is Hughes marshals assiduously, evoking in aptly sensuous and gorgeous prose the citadels, the palaces and the luxuries of that long-vanished world. It is true as well that a growing band of scholars is now prepared to accept the historicity of the Trojan war, and place it in the context of Greek relations with bronze-age Anatolia.

Hughes draws particularly on the work of the Swiss scholar Joachim Latacz, whose recent book on Troy claimed that Homer’s epics contain authentic memories of a Trojan war. Yet not even Latacz argues that Helen — or the heroes who fought over her, come to that — ever existed as historical characters; and what Hughes nowhere acknowledges is that Latacz’s book was written as a response to scholars who ferociously disagree with his arguments. The entire fabulous edifice of her theme, in other words, has been raised on dangerously shifting sands.

The result is a glorious folly: one in which history and mythography have been dazzlingly elided, so that the boundary between the two appears to vanish. Hughes has no more penetrated to the heart of Helen’s mystery than Zeuxis did — but she has certainly, with this passionate and eccentric book, added powerfully to it.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First prices of £18 (Hughes) and £13.49 on 0870 165 8585