Helen Never Went to Troy

About the Book

In Sicily in the 6th century Leonicus, patrician in his late thirties has married Helen, a beauty in her early twenties. He is a retired General, the Governor of the city of Messana, a scholar, an amateur gardener; she daughter of a judge on the bench in Syracuse, raised above her station by an aunt at Taranatum, former Lady-in-Waiting to the Empress Amalsuntha at Ravenna. From this point the story radiates through an unofficial divorce to political turmoil, an attempted murder, the mischances of an absurd villain, many characters, many situations, to a resolution involving a Recognition Scene as in the Old Comedies of Euripides. It is not so much a Who-Done-It as a Who-Done-What. The initial event acts like a pebble dropped in water, producing rings moving outward in all directions until the whole pond is involved.

Acknowledgements due: to a famous Recantation made in the 6th century B.C. by a Sicilian poet, Stesichorus, who declared that Helen never went to Troy; to the same strange story related in one of Plato´s Dialogues; to Euripides´ play, "Helen in Egypt": these not in the story but behind it.

An explanation of the title: it means, simply, that Helen was not guilty. That is what her husband, what she herself, what Bishop Sylvestris and what the reader must find out: in what way her husband is guilty, what the cause, to what extent; in what way she is guilty and of what, and whether the "correspondent," the young scribe involved, is lying, and for what reason. These are questions which open slowly and diversely through the story and come to their climax in the Recognition Scene, when the husband and wife see not only each other but themselves.

A further acknowledgement is owed to the Emperor Justinian´s jurisconsults at Constantinople; they completed a revision of the laws of the Empire: an upheaval in jurisprudence which offers opportunities for a contrast between pagan and Christian ways of understanding, a contrast described by one of the characters as horizontal justice as opposed to vertical justice. This confusion becomes no arid discussion but a living through these views, which are as fundamental to us today as they were then.

And to the reader, an admission: this is not so much a novel as a tale, a winter´s tale, a high romance like the sun over field and forest at evening.

Lastly, a further admission: my desire to write it as well as I could, to give its language an ease, a clarity and a witty elegance which might have entertained the Cardinal de Retz; in a word, something beautiful, classical, humane and true, all that, while being suspenseful; which demanded a brevity in concision that such multiple intentions could hardly allow; and so the story ressembles a play, with scenes instead of chapters, my notion being to lend an air of swift-and-terse to its leisures.

About the Author

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