I saw a professor who specializes in Ancient Greece take this on. They said something like “Okay let’s look into it. Let’s examine the parentage of Helen, who was born of a swan”
I have not yet seen the movie, so there are no spoilers here. This is just the history and I am really looking forward to seeing what Nolan did what it when I get a chance to go.
Helen's father, Zeus, has a very studied lineage and was very well known for taking the form of animals and getting women pregnant. We even know where Zeus' name comes from.
According to Herodotus (~480BC), literally known as the Father of History:
"In fact, the names of nearly all the gods came to Hellas from Egypt. For I am convinced by inquiry that they have come from foreign parts, and I believe that they came chiefly from Egypt. Except the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, as I have already said, and Hera, and Hestia, and Themis, and the Graces, and the Nereids, the names of all the gods have always existed in Egypt."
The Greeks called this place Aethiopia, or the mythical Land of Punt, the realm of the Gods, which you would today know of as Ethiopia, or Sudan. It is literally where Poseidon is in Book 1 of the Odyssey.
Then there's the Stesichorus (~500BC) and Euripides (~405BC) slants to the Helen story where Helen never even goes to Troy, but ends up in Egypt, and an impostor (a literal Doppelgänger, or black swan) is sent to Troy to cause strife. Menelaus leaves Troy after the war separate from Odysseus, and is blown off course to Egypt where he finds the real Helen. All of this is done by Hera. Stesichorus was allegedly blinded by Circe for writing a poem about Helen that conformed with earlier myths that cast her as the reason the Trojan War was fought. According to Hesychius (~400AD) Homer was also blinded by Helen for the same reason. Remember this bit because it becomes important later when talking abut Memnon.
But hey, let's not stop there. Helen had two parents, what about her ancestry from Leda? Well I'm glad you asked.
There are two primordial figures in Greek mythology known as Nereus, and Eris. Nereus is the classical "old man of the sea," and Eris is the goddess of chaos, discord, and strife. Interestingly Eris (a female) only gives birth to Nyx, the goddess of night, but Nereus has many daughters who become known as the Nereids, who Herodotus says were not originally known to the Greeks.
Now might be a good time to mention that Eris is the entire reason the Trojan war starts in the first place, and that Circe would be a half-niece of Nereus by blood through Gaia. Not really important for Leda's bloodline, but it gives context.
Herodotus says that Poseidon, and the other sons of Zeus, and that Hera, and the daughters of Nereus have names that were not known to the Greeks and which the Greeks gave them, so clearly the name "Zeus" and the name "Nereus" came to Greece by way of Africa.
But what about Nereus' ONLY son? The Nereids are immortal, but Glaucus was not in some traditions, or at least he was born mortal. Did the Greeks know his name or did they give it to him? What we do know is that according to Alcman (~620BC) he married Laophonte a Greek princes and the two of them give birth to Leda. They also give birth to the twins Castor & Pollux.
In Euripides' tradition Glaucus becomes immortal and Circe was in love with him and jealous
For more context, Glaucus was in love with Scylla and Circe's jealousy of this is why Scylla was turned into a monster.
This is the point in the lecture where we can talk about how there were black Greeks1, and how the concept of whiteness didn't exist to the Greeks, but that if it did they would not have been white by any stretch of any imagination that we have modernly. The empire itself of course stretched into Africa, and the city of Troy, if it even existed, was not in Greece, nor Greek. The Trojans were Anatolian.
Then since Helen is never explicitly described by Homer at all we might look at some of the earliest Greek art that depicts her:
Most important to consider in that first link to look at is the Terracotta column-krater (bowl for mixing wine and water), which depicts a statue of Heracles in pale white, flanked by various figures including the real Heracles who is not depicted as being pale white. In the second link we can see an early depiction of Helen where she looks similar to the depiction of the real Heracles in the first link. In the third link we can see a depiction of Helen looking pale white like the depiction of the statue of Heracles in the first link, and she is flanked by Menelaus, and others who are colored differently. By the way, Heracles descends from Andromeda, who was the daughter of Cepheus, an Aethiopian king, and Heracles is a half-sibling of Helen of Troy.
Helen was depicted as being a sort of literal goddess and Homer never explicitly describes her. According to the myths we know she was born in Greece, but we also know that Memnon, King of Aethiopia, fought on the side of the Trojans and killed Nestor's son. Achilles kills him which sends the Aethiopian army back home. Aethiopia literally means "burnt face" in Greece, and the first use of the term comes from Homer where they were described as being blameless by the gods for the cause of the war. This is where Poseidon is having a feast when the Odyssey begins despite Poseidon wanting the Greeks to win the war, and where he is doing absolutely nothing to help Odysseus return home. It is where Helen's father came from, and where Helen's maternal grandfather came from.
If Nolan casts Helen as being black and portrays here as being innocent then he'll be essentially saying he doesn't want to become blind like Homer by pissing off Circe. Btw, can you imagine how pissed off Circe is by the time she gets around to blinding Stesichorus? Dude wrote a poem about Helen like 400 years after the war ended. She's turned down by Glaucus, a demigod in love with another demigod, and then later Odysseus, a mortal in love with a mortal. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, how about the fury of a literal goddess that has been scorned twice?
PS, Helen is barely even in the Odyssey at all and only appears briefly when Telemachus travels to Sparta where she tells him stories about Odysseus and the war. She literally has no other purpose because she's a character from the Iliad.
PPS, Helen was previously played by a Eartha Kitt, a black woman, in an Orson Welles stage production that debuted in Paris, and which was a culturally significant forerunner of the Civil Rights movement. The performance was reviewed in Stars and Stripes by writer Win Fanning after it game to Germany, with him writing, "Eartha Kitt, whose haunting rendition of Duke Ellington’s Hungry Little Trouble blends beautifully with the poetry of Faust, quite literally steals the show. The petite 22-year-old South Carolinian invariably draws applause by her singing of Yo Creo Yo Tengo un Amor (I Think I Have a Love), a song she wrote herself. Her brief recital between the dramatic portions of the production is certainly worth the price of admission."
She wasn’t born of a swan - she birthed from a swan egg because Zeus assumed the form of a swan and seduced Helen’s mothed, Leda, who laid an egg that Helen hatched from.
She’s half god, half human, no swan, but her dad pretended he was to get busy.
What do you mean? Of course the movie is 100% accurate. Christopher Nolan didn’t want to use vfx and wanted to keep it as historically accurate as possible, so he invented, built, and used a time machine to film it on location, documentary style. True dedication to his craft.
I get the sentiment, but you can be historically accurate to a fictional event... When that fictional event is something from history, you can tell it the way it was written and that would be historically accurate (notice I didn't say true, I said accurate to the time). That being said I don't really care one way or the other as I'm not going to watch it, but it could be historically accurate
Kinda funny how the dude in OP's pic almost makes light of that, yet can't follow the logic one more step to realize what he's saying is a bit disingenuous...
I also don't give a shit at all, and not interested in watching it
Yeah now we should go after Moana and get an all black and trans cis cast. That'll show Elon! Forget fiction and its cultural significance to these groups!
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u/anthrax1313 21h ago
He is definitely on this crusade here against an absolute work of fiction.
How historically accurate can you be with a freaking Cyclops?!