from June 28, 2014

Plato and Euripides say Helen of Troy had Multiple Personality

If multiple personality is a real, observable, psychological phenomenon—and not just a modern fad—it should be reflected in the history of literature, even in antiquity. And since multiple personality is often represented in literature by the theme of the double, it would be interesting to know how far back that theme goes.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey say that Helen really went to Troy. But there was another version of that story in Ancient Greece, one in which it was Helen’s double, and not Helen herself, who went to Troy.

Plato, in both his Phaedrus and Republic, cites Stesichorus’s Palinode, which is a recantation of Homer’s story that Helen went to Troy. According the Stesichorus version, which is dramatized in Euripides’ play, Helen, it was not Helen, herself, who went to Troy, but only her eidolon (ghost, shadow, image, phantom), which impersonated her.

“In 412/411 B.C.E. [Euripides] produced Helen, a play in which he takes up the theme of the eidolon, to dramatize two confrontations—the one in the mind of Menelaus between the true Helen and her fickle double, and the other between Helen herself and the image of her for which the Greeks and Trojans fought at Troy…Euripides’ Helen is the only surviving treatment of the phantom-Helen theme from antiquity…splitting Helen into her self and her image…Across the Greek world the disjunction between essence and phenomena was the chief topic of conversation among the philosophers and mathematicians, and one of the principal themes of Athenian tragedy. What plot more topical in late fifth-century Athens than the story of a woman divided into her real and her imaginary selves?” (1, pp. 8-9).

Of course, Plato and Euripides did not use the term “multiple personality,” but the theme of the double is close enough.

1. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.