Devoured Divinity

A. Divinity

The core thing they have in common is that they're both semi-divine. in the Iliad in particular they do stand out as straddling that line between human and not-quite, esp regarding their confrontations w gods (like helen vs aphrodite and achilles vs apollo and the river etc). There's like, aeneas and diomedes as well but helen and achilles are specifically disruptive to The Orders Of Things in a way those guys aren't. (the odyssey has a slightly different portrayal of achilles in the nekuia w the nature of his afterlife but that's a slightly different discussion).

I like to think of that divinity as manifesting as a kind of...too-muchness, an intensity of presence and emotion that people who are completely mortal don't have. This is partly informed by medea as well bc she has a very similar intensity to achilles in a lot of her portrayals, even the ones like apollonios where she's very much a 16 year old princess head over heels in love with jason.

B. Destructiveness

The too-muchness (i need a better term for it lmao) also i think manifests in this disruptiveness to the normal structures and social orders. Sometimes, like achilles, they're deliberately disruptive, but a lot of the time it seems like an intrinsic fact of their being (particularly in the case of helen or medea bc its also closely linked to Gender). Helen destroys both the oikos (abandoning Menelaos, whatever ur view on her agency in that situation being) and the polis in the process (her presence at troy being a destructive force on its own) - she's a lot like medea in that respect there's a REASON i think they should be girlfriends. And achilles is given the epithet πτολιπόρθιος, sacker of cities...he's a destructive force against the polis as well. The attention that homer gives to hektor's family places a spotlight on the oikos that achilles destroys too--one of the most heartwrenching parts of the iliad for me is the line about andromache drawing a bath for hektor, not realising he's already been killed and has no need for it (22.442-6). Achilles also denies burial rites to like. A LOT of people by tossing them into the river, adn of course to hektor up until the final part of the poem - his rage is characterised as inhuman and semi-divine and abjectly horrifying primarily because he forgoes the traditional boundaries of war in regards to burial rites. (burial rites tangent sorry but with homeric honour these men are here specifically to die but that death only gets remembered if they are properly buried so being denied burial is like. REALLY bad in this context). So around these figures u get the normal social orders, the ways of organising things and the Rules by which people need to live being disrupted or outright destroyed. It's like these people are Too Much to fit within those normal structures. They just don't fit.

C. Fate

And there's some kinship between helen and achilles in regard to that destructiveness, even though achilles' is far more intentional than helen's. Bc they're both trapped in their own stories, confined by fate, and so the ultimate agency they have over their actions IS really questionable. I'm bringing up medea again but in seneca's version she says medea nunc sum, crevit ingenium malis and it's like. Now i am medea. As if Medea is also a pre-existing cultural concept in the story-world as it is in the world of the writer (tragedies do have a running theme of like. An inability to imagine a world where the tragedy doesn't exist and so they have this self-referential circularity to them like w eumenides). And of course you have Helen weaving scenes from the Iliad itself, tellign the stories maybe, or dooming the men to die

D. Gods ought to fear their children <3

So zeus feared being overthrown by thetis' offspring if he were to have a child with her - that's why he arranged for thetis to be married to peleus instead. As a result, Achilles is mortal, and isn't in any danger of overthrowing zeus, but i think this story has some relevance for helen - bc she is actually zeus' child (she's not fully divine either, but like. Neither was dionysos at first and that didn't stop orphism!). Catherine rozier's article on helen's divine epithets gets at this idea of helen as a weapon that she herself can never use...she's got tremendous power. And Zeus comes from this line of sons usurping their fathers. Zeus has had a great many sons, and rarely you get an implication of succession except w dionysos, but i still think that like. Idk helen is dangerous u know? There's this link between achilles and helen as destructive forces in the human world but also the unrealised potential to be destructive to the divine world as well (keyword being potential. Their semi-divinity makes them dangerous to everyone)

E. Relationship with one another

Ok and the last thing is that Pausanias describes achilles and helen being married in the afterlife, which is a little weird but i have a soft spot for the pairing bc HD does some really interesting things with it in Helen in Egypt. Its like. Idk she really does just pick up on a lot of these things, their divinity, their confinement to their own stories, their respective searches for meaning and identity outside of the narratives once they've ended. But if u are not HD you cannot write about it <3 it is incorrect <3