ABSTRACT
Menelaus: It was not for logos that I came, but to kill you. (Euripides, Trojan Women 903-5)
WHO WAS HELEN?
Who was Helen? In the Greek world (and thereafter) she epitomises sexual passion, an archetype whose cultural significance cannot be exaggerated. Wife of Menelaus, lover of Paris, she is the irresistible bad woman, an adulterous and infinitely desirable counterpart to the eternally faithful Penelope, wife of Odysseus. Even in her first, Homeric, incarnation, she arouses profoundly ambiguous feelings. Although in the fourth book of the Odyssey she initially appears as a wife reinstated in her old home and entertaining Odysseus’ son Telemachus with stories, Menelaus recounts an unsettling anecdote which casts a shadow over her verbal skill. At the moment of maximum danger, when the Achaean warriors were concealed within the wooden horse, she mischievously imitated the voices of their wives to lure them out (Odyssey IV.274-89).1 But her association with logos is implicit from the beginning: she yielded to the verbal importunity of Paris, and she herself possesses a bewitching, deceptive tongue, imitating, with pointed irony, the seductive voices of absent wives, exploiting the separation of husband and wife when she is herself the glaringly, culpably absent wife whom the Greeks have come to retrieve.
