Was This the Face that Launched the Thousand Ships? Homeric Fighting over Beautiful Women

In Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, Faustus conjures up the spirit of Helen of Troy and says: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"  

Many readers of Homer have asked the same question--with the same hint of disbelief.  Was this the face that launched over a thousand Greek ships to Troy for a ten-year long war?  Surely so many men would not engage in such a destructive war just to settle a dispute over one woman. 

But as Jonathan Gottschall has pointed out in The Rape of Troy, the primary conflicts in the Iliad and the Odyssey are over sexual access to women.  Moreover, Homer's men compete not just for any women but for beautiful women.  Homer also suggests that this competition for access to women was rendered especially intense by the shortage of available women.

Helen was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.  She was the daughter of Zeus and Leda.  She married Menelaus of Sparta.  Her abduction by Paris of Troy (or perhaps her elopement with him) started the Trojan War.  But this is only one of many examples in the Iliad and the Odyssey of men attempting to gain sexual access to women claimed by other men.  The Greek warriors fought the Trojans not just to recover Helen for Menelaus but with the expectation that with the fall of Troy the Greeks could rape and enslave the Trojan women as their concubines, which they did.

And, of course, the primary conflict in the Odyssey arises from the suitors' meddling with women that Odysseus claims as his exclusive sexual property--his wife Penelope and his enslaved concubines.  Eventually, Odysseus massacres all the suitors and kills the twelve slave women who have been raped or seduced by the suitors.  He tells Telemachus and two male servants: "Hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them.  They will forget the things the suitors made them do with them in secret, through Aphrodite" (Odyssey 22.442-45).

Now it is true that Homer's men are competing with one another not just for women but also for wealth and social status.  But these proximate categories of competition--for status, wealth, and women--all serve the ultimate goal of enhanced reproductive success.  Wealthier high-status men have more sexual access to women, which means greater reproductive fitness.

Men with wealth and high status could be polygynous.  Although Homer's world was legally monogamous in that a man could have only one wife, it was effectively polygynous in that a man could have exclusive sexual access to multiple women, including enslaved concubines.  As a consequence of this polygynous mating by rich and powerful men, many low-status men had no mates at all.

Gottschall shows that the violent competition among the men for sexual access to women was a consequence of a shortage of available young women relative to young men.  This would explain why so many unmarried young men were willing to go to war or join raiding parties with the hope of capturing women.  

There were two reasons for this shortage of female reproductive capacity--the polygynous institution of slave-concubinage that allowed high-status men to monopolize many women and female infanticide (killing female infants either by abandoning them or by feeding the boys more than the girls).

Gottschall concedes that the practice of female infanticide is never explicitly acknowledged in Homer's poems.  But the poems do convey the cultural preference for sons over daughters.  They also suggest that in many families sons outnumbered daughters.

Priam's sons outnumber his daughters four to one; Zeus mentions many illegitimate sons and no illegitimate daughters (Iliad 14.312-28); among the dead 'wives of the might' (11.227) that parade by Odysseus in the underworld we hear of seventeen sons and only one daughter (Odyssey 11.23-332); Nausicaa is apparently an only daughter among five brothers (Odyssey 6.57-65); Briseis mentions three brothers and no sisters (Iliad 19.291-300); Andromache mentions seven brothers and no sisters (Iliad 6.414-30); Hector, Sarpedon, Achilles, and other young warriors have sons and no daughters; and, while we never hear of Nestor's sisters, we know he has eleven brothers along with seven sons (11.692-93) (Gottschall 2008, 128).

The strongest predictor of violence within and between societies is a male-biased sex ration--especially when the number of available young men exceeds the number of available young women.  There is a good biological reason for this: unmarried men have, on average, higher levels of circulating testosterone than married men of the same age.  Testosterone levels also drop when men become fathers and care for their children.  We can assume, therefore, that Homer's world was especially violent because it was saturated with testosterone, particularly in those young men who went off to war hoping to capture women that they could rape and enslave as their concubines.  Charles Darwin recognized this: "When, owing to female infanticide, the women of a tribe were few, the habit of capturing wives from neighboring peoples would naturally arise" (Descent of Man [2004], 660).

Escaping from Homer's world of manly violence, the best way to lower the violence in any society is to enforce a strictly monogamous marriage system, with a roughly equal ratio of available men to available women, so that men are equal in their chance to find a sexual mate.  Indeed, as I will argue in a future post, the evolutionary spread of monogamy among the modern Western liberal societies was largely responsible for the declining violence in those societies.

I will also have to show that while the good is the desirable, what Homer's men desire--rape, polygyny, and unjust war--are not truly desirable and thus not good.