Why do we return to Greek literature, ideas, and culture again and again?

I ask this as someone who is happily rooted in classical Christian education, which is an education grounded in the Greco-Roman tradition but submitted to a Christian worldview, but everyone who is lives in the Western world is a cultural offspring of the Greeks, knowingly or not.

Why do we spend so much time on the Greeks and the Romans who followed them?

Of course, there are a multitude of reasons, but I would like to highlight one cultural trait of the Greeks that can be glimpsed in their foundational stories. What made Greece unique among the ancient cultures was its willingness to interrogate its own ideals and behaviors rather than simply celebrate them. The Greeks were a people who were constantly questioning themselves and the nature of life. They were willing to hold a mirror to their faces and expose their own flaws.

To see this cultural humility clearly, we should look at the foundational story of Greek paideia (the education and enculturation of their children): the Trojan War. This story, especially as described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was memorized, recited, and copied for intellectual and moral formation by Greek children.

While the men receive the majority of the spotlight in those epics, the women can give us a very clean insight into the Greeks’ introspective uniqueness. You see, by preserving and highlighting women like Helen and Andromache, Greek literature reveals a culture committed to self-reflection and self-critique.

HELEN: THE CAUSE OF WAR

We begin with Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” Helen was the most beautiful woman to ever live, the possessor of a mythological beauty. During this period, Greece was united by a shared culture but divided politically into city-states ruled by kings. Helen’s father, in order to prevent civil war among the many kings who sought her hand in marriage, required them to swear an oath that they would defend and support whichever man he chose for her to marry. That man was Menelaus, the king of Sparta.

Later, when Helen runs away from Menelaus with Paris, the prince of Troy, Menelaus calls upon the Greek kings to honor their oath. Their combined attack on Troy becomes the Trojan War. Helen, therefore, stands at the very center of the conflict.

What is striking is how the Greeks portray her. Again, Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her beauty is superlative, almost absolute. In many ways, she is the personification of beauty itself. And that alone helps explain the fascination surrounding her.

We inherit our pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful from the Greeks. Plato, in the Republic, says that the goal of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful. That claim is a snapshot of Greek culture as a whole.

Even the Romans recognized this. In Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, when Aeneas speaks with his deceased father Anchises, he is told about the future of Rome. Anchises acknowledges that other peoples (the Greeks are clearly particularly in mind) will excel in crafting beautiful sculptures and works that seem to come alive. The Roman task, however, will be different: to impose justice and peace upon the world. Thus, even Rome understood that it did not match Greece in the pursuit and production of beauty.

But beauty is a double-edged sword, and Helen reveals that fact with devastating clarity. Because she so fully embodies beauty, Helen becomes a powerful symbol of its allure and its danger. In many accounts, she appears almost as an object passed back and forth by various men. To modern readers, this can feel misogynistic. But I think Greek literature is doing something more complex. Again, she is often presented as a representation of beauty itself, something desired, contested, fought over.

And that is what makes the Trojan War so tragic. In the war over Helen, we see that beauty attracts, compels, and provokes. It divides. It destroys.

INTROSPECTION

Yet Helen is not a silent beauty.

In Book 3 of the Iliad, she stands on the walls of Troy with King Priam and the Trojan women, watching the war unfold beneath them. As they look out over the battlefield, she tells Priam, “Would that death—evil death—had been my choice when I followed your son here.”

Did Helen go with Paris willingly, or was she kidnapped or deceived into going with Paris? Greek literature deliberately remains ambiguous, never giving a definitive answer. But what matters here is that Helen understands her place as the cause of the war. She recognizes that she stands at the center of the catastrophe, where thousands of Greeks and Trojans were dying for her sake. And she does not avert her eyes from that fact.

Few ancient cultures allowed the cause of a war to speak with such clarity and self-judgment. Helen is the human catalyst that set the war in motion, yet the Greeks give her space to speak, to reflect, to judge herself, and to articulate guilt.

In this way, Helen mirrors the Greek capacity for introspection. And that same capacity will appear even more when the Greeks allow Andromache, a Trojan woman, an enemy, and ultimately a prize of war, to speak. But we will turn to her in a moment.

MIMESIS

But Helen also resembles Greek culture in another equally important way: through her gift of mimesis. In Book 4 of the Odyssey, Helen is described as having a mimetic voice, the ability to imitate the voices of others perfectly. Let us consider how that gift is portrayed and functions within the story.

Helen first tells Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, a story about the Trojan War. She recounts how Odysseus once snuck into Troy disguised as a beggar, and how she alone recognized him. Because Odysseus was married to her cousin and had a friendship with Helen, she claims to have bathed him, cared for him, anointed him with oil, and then sent him safely on his way, never betraying his identity.

Immediately after this, however, King Menelaus tells a very different story. He describes the moment when the Greeks were hidden inside the Trojan Horse. Helen, accompanied by her attendants, came to the horse and began calling out to the soldiers inside, speaking to them in the voices of their wives. Each heard the familiar voice of the woman he had left behind in Greece. Menelaus says that if it had not been for Odysseus restraining them, they would have all responded, revealing themselves, and ruining their one chance at victory. Thus, Helen’s mimetic gift was used against the Greeks themselves.

This is fascinating because mimesis lies at the very heart of Greek education. The Greeks believed that mastery of any art, whether rhetoric, poetry, sculpture, or moral formation, came only through imitation. Artists copied their masters. Rhetoricians memorized great speeches. Children learned through recitation and copywork. The Greeks believed that a person could not create well until he learned to imitate well.

Helen’s mimetic ability, then, is not incidental. It is a deeply Greek virtue. And it points toward one of ancient Greece’s greatest cultural achievements: its capacity for empathy, even toward their enemies.

Helen displays that mimesis is not an inherent moral good. Like so many gifts, it can be used for either good or ill. But what distinguishes Greek culture is not simply its technical usage of imitation but its imaginative use of it, that is, their ability to inhabit the voices, perspectives, and inner lives of others.

Later Greek literature would excel at this, but it begins with Homer. In the Iliad, the Trojans are not portrayed as cartoonish villains; instead, they are fully human. Indeed, in many ways, Hector is more honorable than many of the Greek heroes. His courage, love for his family and homeland, and sense of duty are deeply sympathetic. We will see this even more clearly when we consider Andromache.

Herodotus carries this same instinct into his histories. When writing about the Persian wars, he never depicts the Persians as simplistic villains. He treats them with seriousness and respect, describing their customs, virtues, and motivations. The Greeks possessed an unusual ability to recognize what was noble and admirable in other cultures, an ability that most other ancient cultures did not share.

AMBIGUITY

In Helen, we can see at least one more Greek distinctive: their willingness to wrestle with difficult questions.

For instance, Helen blames herself for the war. Priam, however, tells her that the gods were responsible. Then, in the Odyssey, Helen says that Aphrodite deceived her into going with Paris. So, whose fault was the Trojan War? Helen, Paris, or the gods?

The Greeks were content to let the tension stand, unresolved. They did not rush to eliminate ambiguity. Did human choices cause the war, or did divine forces? Their answer, effectively, was yes.

Unlike later philosophical systems that strive for tidy and uniform resolutions, Greek thought was willing to dwell in complexity. This willingness to live with unresolved tension fostered a culture capable of self-reflection rather than reflexive self-justification.

Helen, therefore, is more than just a character in a story. She becomes a symbol of Greek culture itself: alluring and dangerous, self-aware and morally complex, beautiful yet costly.

ANDROMACHE: THE COST OF WAR

If Helen represents the cause of war, then Andromache represents its cost.

Andromache was the wife of Hector, Troy’s greatest warrior and the Trojan counterpart to Achilles. Her very name is symbolic. It is derived from aner (man) and mache (battle), so her name means “the battle of men” or “men’s war.” Of course, Andromache does not fight, yet her life is dominated by war. That irony is precisely what makes her so symbolic. She embodies the cost of war. She is the outcome of war made visible.

In Book 6 of the Iliad, Hector returns inside the walls of Troy to visit Andromache and his infant son, Astyanax, for the final time. Hector speaks to his wife of honor, duty, and necessity. He must defend the city. He must fight for Troy.

In many ways, the Trojan War was the first world war. It was East versus West: Troy and its eastern allies fighting against Greece and its western coalition. Yet both sides are remarkably similar. They worship the same gods. They speak the same language. And they are driven by the same ideals.

You see, Hector is motivated by the same heroic worldview as the Greeks outside the walls of Troy. Central to this worldview is the concept of kleos, which is glory, the fame of a warrior won through battle that outlives the warrior himself. That glory is closely tied to time, honor, which is often displayed through tangible prizes of combat: armor taken from fallen enemies, wealth and women claimed by the winning army.

The Greeks and Trojans both share this vision of war as a means of acquiring honor and glory. Hector speaks from within that shared framework. He must defend Troy because his time and kleos depend on it.

Andromache answers him from a completely different perspective. She does not speak of glory. She speaks of consequence. She tells Hector plainly what will happen: he will die, she will become a widow, their son will become an orphan, and Troy will burn.

And she is right.

By giving Andromache space to speak, Homer allows the household to answer the battlefield. War is not merely celebrated in the Iliad; it is interrogated. Homer does not negate the heroic ideals, but he does place them alongside the suffering of women and children, the noncombatants who bear the aftermath of those ideals, which was extraordinarily rare in ancient literature.

Indeed, everything Andromache fears comes to pass. Hector dies. Troy falls. Greek literature allows women to be correct. Later Greek tragedies, especially Euripides, take this even further. In plays like The Trojan Women and Andromache, the suffering of women who lived through the war only to endure slavery, concubinage, and being forced to bear the children of the men who killed their husbands is considered and contemplated.

The Greeks were willing to imagine themselves into the suffering of those they conquered. And even though Euripides explores this explicitly, the foundation is set by Homer.

We see this same instinct in the Odyssey. As Odysseus prepares to leave the land of the Phaeacians and finally return home, he hears songs being sung about the Trojan War. As he listens, he begins to weep. Homer compares his grief to that of a Trojan woman watching her husband die and being led away into slavery.

This comparison is astonishing. The Greek hero, the victor of the war, is being compared to an enemy woman, someone who, according to the logic of the age, would have been counted among the spoils of victory. Homer subverts that logic by binding the Greek hero to the suffering of those he defeated. This imaginative identification with the conquered is virtually unparalleled in the ancient world. And this is something that the Greeks did consistently and deliberately.

CONCLUSION

When we place Helen and Andromache side-by-side, what emerges is a cultural self-portrait of Greece itself. Helen represents beauty, imitation, and self-reflection. Andromache represents the household, the enemy, and the price of war upon those who cannot fight it.

Greek culture preserved the voice of the woman who drew the war and the voice of the woman who bore its aftermath. In doing so, it demonstrated a remarkable capacity for aesthetic self-critique, moral complexity, and tragic honesty. What made Greece unique was that it allowed the voices of the defeated and grieving to endure alongside those of its heroes.

This is why, especially in classical Christian education, we return to the Greeks. They were far from perfect, but they, nevertheless, modeled honest self-examination. Under Christ’s lordship, we can appreciate their pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty while recognizing that only in Christ are these virtues perfected and only through Him can we truly see ourselves.