I was so grateful that she took the time to record her own narration of this first, amazing book. I loved it and eagerly Bettany Hughes's works just as soon as they're released. But the book engulfed me over the next few weeks into early 2006. I had never heard of Bettany Hughes at that time. There it was in my inbox from Audible: "New, On Sale, From An Author That You Know: 'Helen of Troy' by Bettany Hughes." Immediately flooded with nostalgia, I clicked "buy." I received this book as a Christmas gift in 2005. Vivid and compelling, this remarkable book brilliantly unpacks the facts and myths surrounding one of the most enigmatic and notorious figures of all time.On the morning of December 15, 2022, I checked my email in my car before heading into work. Through the eyes of a young Mycenaean woman, Hughes examines the physical, historical and cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor. Helen exists in many guises: a matriarch from the Age of Heroes who ruled over one of the most fertile areas of the Mycenaean world Helen of Sparta, the focus of a cult which conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess the home-wrecker of the Iliad the bitch-whore of Greek tragedy the pin-up of Romantic artists.įocusing on the 'real' Helen - a flesh-and-blood aristocrat from the Greek Bronze Age - acclaimed historian Bettany Hughes reconstructs the context of life for this elusive pre-historic princess and places her alongside the heroes and heroines of myth and history. For millennia she has been viewed as an exquisite agent of extermination. Because of her double marriage to the Greek King Menelaus and the Trojan Prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for both the Trojan War and enduring enmity between East and West. As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject for nearly three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield.
0 kommentar(er)
