ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the Brygos Painter's Louvre Iliupersis cup, Louvre G152, to explore new ideas and interpretations on the visual and semantic links between Helen and the two sacrificial virgins of the Trojan epic. Karl Schefold observes the importance of women in the Trojan cycle, noting that the frequent appearance of Helen on Archaic shield bands "seems to exalt the person of Helen to such an extent that the Trojan War appears more as a poem about the divinely beautiful Helen than as a poem about Achilles". The iconographic ambiguity between Helen and Polyxena appears in one of the earliest works of Greek art with a combination of Iliupersis scenes, that is the seventh century BCE terracotta relief pithos in Mykonos. Polyxena appears for the second time on the Capitoline tablet on the right hand side below the walls of Troy about to be sacrificed at the hands of Neoptolemos.
