I came away from umpteen years of school with the understanding that the things in life that interested me most were going to be those I discovered myself. Somehow, anything put in front of me in a classroom came with a dry, one-dimensional quality that spoiled many a good story.

That might have been me, resisting being taught, or it might have had something to do with teachers bored rigid by the drudgery of using the same lines to din the same stuff into the same little minds, year after year.

But since then, I have sometimes had the experience of running across something unexpected and additional to the story as I was taught it?some new fact whose spark lit up a nearly-forgotten figure, still in the murk somewhere at the back of my mind.

With Helen of Troy, who teaching had flattened to just another one of the characters in boring old Homer's poetry, it was a little snatch of dialogue in Derek Walcott's play, "Odysseus".

It comes early in the play, when Odysseus's son, Telemachus, having left his mother in Ithaca to go and look for his wandering father, visits Menelaus, the King of Sparta, to see if he can help.

(Helen, who was said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world in her time, was married to Menelaus before she was seduced by Paris, who took her off to Troy. The siege began when Menelaus appealed to his warrior-king brother, Agamemnon, to get her back.)

Telemachus finds Menelaus in Sparta, and Helen there with him. She introduces herself to him by saying, "I'm Helen. Or I used to be."

Menelaus explains to Telemachus: "She's bored. She misses Troy."

Helen: "I do not miss Troy."

Menelaus: "Miss being its centre. Its cause?"

Helen: "Miss Troy! That's a stupid remark, Menelaus."

Menelaus: "Sorry, dear."

That was enough, for me, to make Helen jump out of the single dimension of the poetry I had had to learn, and become a three-dimensional character ? a woman dealing with the way great beauty and fame and intense experience had magnified the effects of ageing, a proud, tragic and resentful figure.

She wasn't an innocent party in her abduction. She must, as a young girl, have been thrilled to have been stolen from Menelaus by Paris. She must have been thrilled to have been the cause of a war. Paris was her lover before and during the siege of Troy. His death, and, as she became more mature, the death of others like Hector, who had fought so hard for her, caused her great grief.

In the end, she must have suffered the most hideous tangle of emotions when she was returned to her husband. In all, she had lived her young life oh, so very intensely. So when, 30 years later, she met Telemachus, the son of one of the figures in her great adventure, she must have been reminded of what age had taken away from her.

She saw herself in Telemachus's eyes as an old woman? living a quiet life in Sparta with a husband who said things like, "Sorry, dear." In case you might miss the point, Walcott has Menelaus, a few lines farther on, accuse Helen of having a memory that is fading "like your hair dye, darling".

Walcott has acknowledged being influenced by the French Caribbean poet, Saint-John Perse (like Walcott, a winner of the Nobel prize for literature).

Perse wrote a moving poem called "Pictures for Crusoe", about the life, in England, of the rescued Robinson Crusoe, one part of which deals with the fate of his goatskin parasol:

It is there in the grey odour of dust under the eaves of the attic.

It is beneath the three-legged table;

it is between the box of sand for the cat and the unopened barrel piled with feathers.

Might Walcott have been thinking of that poem when he wrote of Helen as he did in "Odysseus"? I think he might.

His insight brought Helen to life in my mind, all right, but what, precisely, was he bringing to life?

A ghost? Or just a successful idea of Homer's?

In "The Iliad", Homer described Helen in this way:

?so they waited, the old chiefs of Troy, as they sat aloft the tower.

And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,

they murmured to one another, gentle, winged words:

"Who on earth could blame them?

Ah, no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered

years of agony all for her, for such a woman.

Beauty, terrible beauty!

That sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? More poetry than reality, more soap opera than life? It doesn't seem a long jump from that to this:

It almost makes me cry to tell

What foolish Harriet befell.

That's an exaggeration, but you'll know what I mean. Greek legend claims Helen was the only daughter of the god Zeus, who took the form of a swan to seduce and impregnate her mother, Leda.

When Hekabe, the Queen of Troy, gave birth to Paris, she dreamed she had brought a flaming sword into the world.

Cassandra made a prediction that this child would destroy the city unless he were killed. His parents tried to kill him?but failed.

Even in the knowledge that it was just standard operating procedure in epic poetry of the day, it's hard for a 21st Century reader to jump across that kind of fantastic material, to arrive at an understanding of Helen and the others who populate Homer's poetry as flesh and blood.

Is it all just myth, passed on to us by a superb storyteller in the person of Homer? Did Helen exist? Did Troy? The answers may be fascinating history, but they are also fundamental to one's understanding of the poet Homer.

As you might imagine, the history-or-myth argument has raged for a long time. Later Greeks, and 19th Century scholars, thought the legend of Troy was incomprehensible, as it was written.

But in the middle part of the last century, two things happened. First, tablets were deciphered, which seemed to have been written in a form of Greek that bore a striking resemblance to Homeric literary dialect, and which contained some of the names of the characters in Homer? Hektor, Achilleus, Aias, Pandaros and Orestes.

The second event was the publication in 1954 of a hugely influential book called "The World of Odysseus", written by the Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, M I (Sir Moses) Finley. In it, Sir Moses said flatly that there had come to be an abundance of empirical evidence that the world Homer wrote about did exist. The opinions of later Greeks and 19th Century scholars, he said, were irrelevant.

And it was equally beside the point that the narrative might be a collection of fictions from beginning to end? he meant from the standpoint of history, of course. Whether the siege was fiction or not was something he was not able, during his life, to establish beyond doubt. He wrote, I like to think with a little regret, of the excavations of the 19th Century amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schlieman, who rediscovered the city of Troy near the Dardanelles in Asia Minor.

Although Schlieman dug extensively in the ruins, he found not a scrap of evidence on the site of the City's destruction in a siege. "Troy," Sir Moses wrote, "turns out to have been a pitiful, poverty-stricken little place, with no treasure, without any large or imposing buildings, with nothing remotely resembling a palace."

Sir Moses died in 1986. Two years later, Professor Manfred Korfmann of T?bingen University went back to the site in the Dardanelles with a large, international team of archaeologists.

Puzzled by the fact that the excavated gates to the city appeared to have no means of being locked shut, he had a magnetic scan done of a very much larger area outside that identified by Schlieman. The scan revealed that Schlieman had excavated only a small, inner part of Troy. In its totality, it was a much bigger and grander city than he had thought it was. Furthermore, digging unearthed evidence, from exactly the right period in history, that the city had been razed to the ground, probably by a conquering army.

There were skeletons, there were arrowheads and there were piles of slingshots, as if stockpiled for use in fending off enemy archers. No wooden horse, perhaps... but the new evidence does strongly back the claim that Troy really was destroyed by an enemy army at the end of the Bronze Age. Korfmann's group is still working, of course.

But it does seem that the dry-as-dust-dead Helen is able to emerge, after all, into an entirely new kind of life. So is Homer.

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