Greece: sex, lies and Helen of Troy

Bettany Hughes takes her daughters on the trail of the Greek princess across the Peloponnese

We had come to this part of Greece because I was writing a book and preparing a TV programme about Helen of Troy, the original sex goddess whose beauty was said to have sparked the Trojan War. While everyone remembers Helen as the face that launched a thousand ships, few recall how many miles she clocked up in her various erotic liaisons. Greece, Turkey, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete — as well as seeing it all, she saw them all. So when I set out to write about Helen’s roots in prehistory — and to identify the traces she has left in Western civilisation — I knew that for at least part of the gargantuan journey the family would have to come along too.

Replicating Helen’s journeys where possible, we started with a boat trip from Cape Sounion, south of Athens, to the Peloponnese. As a start to our adventure the boat trip could not have been more magical. Children fractious from a long flight were lulled by the hum of the SeaCat. The water was a looking-glass — broken only when we were paced by dolphins. I mused that with sea travel so much a part of Greek life, Helen must also have taken such journeys.

In search of a bed for the night we hopped off at the island of Aegina (where gold artefacts from the Late Bronze Age — the period in which Helen lived — have been found), and when that drew a blank, the island of Kythera (medieval versions of the story insist that the Trojan prince Paris first espied Helen worshipping at the temple of Aphrodite here). All rooms alongside both quaysides were full — a reminder that at the end of October when the sun is still golden, Greeks flock to the resorts normally populated by tourists.

So we backtracked and landed at Hydra — a good move. Staying in a converted sponge factory called Bratsera with one of the few swimming pools on the island (water is at a premium here), we found a romantic hideaway that I imagined Helen would relish with lemons, jasmine and geraniums in the courtyard and homemade marmalade for breakfast.

Later, we visited the Argolid plain — the centre of Greek power in the Late Bronze Age and the home of impressive Mycenaean sites. All of them, Mycenae itself, Tiryns, Midea and Argos, had a reputation for fostering skilled horse- riders — in the Iliad, Agamemnon the King of Mycenae is “that skilled breaker of horses”. Little has changed. The equine tradition still has verve. Today the city of Argos itself is a workaday place, jaunty but a bit rough-neck. As we passed through we found ourselves in the middle of a horse carnival: lusty-looking men clattered down the streets, playing dodge with the cars. There had been a race between neighbouring towns: you could virtually smell the testosterone in the air.

And then suddenly — a gypsy boy appeared. Like the other men he wore no hard hat, but unlike them he was bare-chested. The horse was saddleless and around its neck swung a bright necklace — two strings of turquoise and coral beads, at the bottom a leather pendant in the shape of a heart. Immediately I had in mind those ancient heroes of Greece who, we are told, thundered through Greece to try to win Helen’s hand in a marriage contest; hot and brown, a lot of flesh on show, all yearning to win glory and a princess. I told my girls the stories as we drove out of Argos and on to Mycenae itself — the gypsy boy, grinning, clattered behind us.

We also stayed at La Belle Helene, a guest house just south of Mycenae. It was the base for the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann when he excavated Mycenae and has attracted an astonishing array of visitors: Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Britten, Jean-Paul Sartre, Heinrich Himmler — all of whom signed the visitors’ book.

I went back there while shooting my documentary about Helen for Channel 4 and woke up covered in mosquito bites — one on the end of my nose swelled up to the size of a small ping-pong ball. But the view of the mountains from Herr Schliemann’s old room can’t be beaten.

The citadel of Mycenae itself can never disappoint. Cradled by the Arachnaion mountain range, it is all you could hope for in a ruin — secret underground water cisterns to explore by torchlight, worn marble walkways and gasp-making artistry. Here you can see the golden Mask of Agamemnon, finely wrought bronze swords and grotesque figurines.

As we watched the sun go down from the throne room, and imagined these treasures on show in the Bronze Age palace, it was clear that my two girls thought this was a journey worth making.

I suspect their enthusiasm for our trip was fuelled by the fact that Greece has so successfully embraced café culture and an enormous chocolate ice-cream is always just around the corner. And if there was a grazed knee or a lost teddy, a woman in black would always appear clutching a handbag with a melted bar of chocolate and a slightly sticky sweet.

The king of ice-cream providers is Greece’s old capital Nafplion — my all-time favourite family-friendly location. Arcing around a bay with a Venetian castle as a backdrop, the town has playgrounds along its chic seafront where all ages hang out until midnight. We stayed in the Nafplia Palace — the glamorous hotel’s Seventies aesthetic has its own retro charm — using it as a base from which to take in the local sites.

Near by, at the tiny settlement of Asine, we achieved the perfect combination of prehistoric past and 21st-century holiday experience. The walls of the Mycenaean citadel there — commemorated by Homer in the Iliad — reach down to the sandy beach of Tolo. While the girls played at mermaids in rock pools on the beach, I nipped up some treacherous steps, overgrown with prickly oak. Here archaeologists have found tangible evidence of the brutality of Bronze Age warrior culture: skulls, split open and then rehealed, gruesome medical instruments, young male skeletons displaying multiple war-wounds: an indication that the Age of Heroes was almost certainly as blood-laden and bellicose as imagined by Homer.

While I mused on Helen’s place in all of this, the rest of the family wandered up to the Alexandros Restaurant in town. Our lunch felt a little end-of-seasony (the owner had run out of paper tablecloths and the charcoal fire was misbehaving), but the food was fresh and fabulous. We shared the patio with a group of super-hip Greek bikers — always, I have discovered, when picking up food on the road, a good sign.

Hearing that we were heading off to Sparta, they followed us, roaring behind through the Parnon mountains. Here, in Pellana, we visited a museum where a new temple to Helen had just been excavated.

The old couple who lived next door laughed at the idea that we might be looking for evidence of the heroes and heroines of the distant past — they were far more concerned to sell us their homegrown cabbages. But while we were chatting my eldest overturned yet another piece of fine pottery, destined, as with the first, to be left behind for the authorities, but proof positive in her mind that we were hot on the trail of our Spartan Queen.