Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation

Abstract

168 PHOENIX Comedy’s focus on extreme vulgarity. Acosta-Hughes (Chapter Seventeen) discusses the involvement of hellenistic poets, especially Callimachus, with the theatre and examines those works of Theocritus that seem to evoke performative contexts. Though addressing a dauntingly complex topic, this volume manages to be both comprehensive and accessible, with almost all its chapters providing important insights into a variety of issues. Agreeably interdisciplinary, it offers a welcome shift of focus from the predominant Athenocentrism of the majority of approaches to Greek drama. It should be of use to classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists, and theatre studies specialists alike. Open University of Cyprus Vayos Liapis Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation. By Ruby Blondell. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xvii, 289. Upon seeing this title one is tempted to ask, “Why another discussion of Helen?” Several monographs and articles have appeared in recent years1 and, taken together with her cinematic popularity, the oft-married Spartan woman has arguably provoked Helenfatigue among readers. But it does not take reading far into this volume to be convinced that this might be the Helen book we have been waiting for. Blondell situates her discussion of Helen in the broader context of Greek views of beauty. In the first chapter she argues that Greek writers focused on the idea that female beauty by arousing eros was capable of rendering men powerless, emasculated. In what follows Blondell examines how narratives of Helen use this icon of beauty in various ways to construct Greek masculine identity and Greek identity considered more broadly. She examines texts from Homeric poetry to Isocrates. In Chapter Three she looks at the Iliad, reading Helen’s self-blame as actually increasing her value, by conforming to men’s expectations of women. The poet’s narrative strategy, in Blondell’s view, was to align Helen with a masculine agenda, assigning to her both subjectivity and guilt. In the next chapter Blondell sees the Helen of the Odyssey, when she is back in Sparta with Menelaus, as a focalizer for a belief in the instability of marriage. Her behaviour remains consistent with the Greek view of women as uncanny and dangerous. The figure of Helen in archaic lyric poetry is the subject of Chapter Five. Blondell begins with Alcaeus. In his poetry Helen’s role in the Trojan War continues to be twoedged : objectified, she is a prize worth fighting for and afforded a poetic opportunity to highlight male heroism, but as a subject she is blamed for her marital transgression and for the horrors she causes on the battlefield. Helen’s beauty figured naturally in 1 Among the books are Laurie Maguire, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (West Sussex 2009); Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca 2008); Brittany Hughes, Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (New York 2005); Carlo Brillante, Il mito di Elena (Turin 2002). Articles include Maria C. Pantelia, “Helen and the Last Song for Hector,” TAPA 132 (2003) 21–27; Ilja L. Pfeijffer, “Shifting Helen: An Interpretation of Sappho, Fragment 16 (Voigt),” CQ n.s. 50 (2000) 1–6; Timothy W. Boyd, “Recognizing Helen,” ICS 23 (1998) 1–18; Gary S. Meltzer, “Where is the Glory of Troy? Kleos in Euripides’ Helen,” CA 13 (1994) 234–255; Ingrid Holmberg, “Euripides’ Helen: Most Noble and Most Chaste,” AJP 116 (1995) 19–42. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 169 the songs of Sappho, particularly in fr. 16V. Here Blondell’s reading differs strikingly from the view that there is agency in Sappho’s description of Helen’s departure from Sparta in the (fragmentary) third stanza. Blondell sees the poet as locating beauty— defined as “what one desires”—in Paris, since it was he whom Helen desired (112). Embodying eros, Paris becomes for Blondell the (missing) subject of par‡gag' in line 11, and beauty’s power is over Helen, not derived from her.2 Accepting that beauty, by the logic of the poem, is to be defined as one’s desirability explains for Blondell why the poem’s speaker can turn to praise of the beautiful Anactoria. This would mean that Sappho’s ultimate focus is the speaker’s desire: would this...