welcome to my πολύτροπος mind

There's just SO much tension between Menelaus and Helen in Odyssey 4!!! She tells a story about how she was always on the Achaeans' side and helped them from within Troy, then he tells a story about how she was working with the Trojans to actively set a trap for the Greeks and tried to get him personally (among others) killed, then she drugs everyone at dinner. Is one of those stories a lie? Are both of them lies? This is not a portrait of a happy marriage or of a man who's just so in love with his wife that he's put the events of the past twenty years behind him! You have to wonder what exactly Helen is suppressing with those drugs of hers that are νηπενθές τʼ ἄχολόν τε, κακῶν ἐπίληθον ἁπάντων, "against sorrow and against anger, causing forgetfulness of all evils." I think (in part) that she's suppressing other narrative possibilities for their relationship, because we know in many accounts Menelaus does intend to kill Helen and comes very close to doing it.

Like look at the Trojan Women, where Menelaus is deciding between killing Helen right there at Troy or bringing her back to Greece to kill her there, and the scene ends with him assuring Hecuba that she won't have a chance to seduce him into sparing her life because she'll be on a different ship. The audience presumably knows that he will indeed end changing his mind, as mentioned in Andromache (627-631). I don't think there are any versions where Menelaus actually does kill Helen (although there were some weird local Helen cult-myths on Rhodes), but both his intention to kill her and her convincing him otherwise by baring her breasts are older traditions that Euripides is working with, not things he invented.

The Odyssey doesn't directly allude to that post-sack moment but I do think it's absolutely behind the text, and it's what Helen's suppressing with her drugs. Can't let Menelaus remember what happened during the war for too long, or he'll be overcome by rage as well as grief. The only things keeping that marriage together are 1) the drugs and 2) the fact that she's Zeus's daughter. He can't harm Zeus's daughter, especially not in the Odyssey where his status is premised upon his being Zeus's son-in-law (according to Proteus). So Helen has several kinds of power over him that prevent him from moving toward the other narrative possibility of outright killing her.

i formalized it just for you. and @ilions-end. but mostly you

sorry i've been sitting on your ask for so long! i am not and never have been a classics student; i came across most of these articles incidentally or here on tumblr:

"the odysseys within the odyssey" by italo calvino

"a note on memory and reciprocity in homer's odyssey" by anita nikkanen

"penelope and the poetics of remembering" by melissa mueller

"a glossary of haunting" by eve tuck and c. ree (this is mostly about horror fiction and settler-colonialism but it has a gloss on the cyclops that i think everyone, certainly everyone american, should read)

silence in the land of logos by silvia montiglio chapter 8: "silence, ruse, and endurance: odysseus and beyond"

"the name of odysseus" by g.e. dimock, jr.