τί φαίνομαι δῆτ᾽;

Wipe off the tears that you are shedding for your dear Creusa. I will not see the haughty palaces of the Dolopians or Myrmidons or go to serve Greek matrons as their slave—I, daughter of the line of Dardanus, who once was married to the son of Venus. No: the Great Mother keeps me on these shores. So now, goodbye—and always love our son.

I yearn for Minoan pixel game... do not know how to code... so I'll just animate it

Sappho’s choice of the grammatical neuter for the love object in line 4 (“whatever” one desires, not “whomever”) contributes to the implied objectification of Paris, who, as the object of Helen’s desire, sets her in motion without any indication of agency on his part. It was (probably) not Paris but Aphrodite or Eros who “led her astray” (11), presumably by holding out an alluring vision of Paris’s beauty, as Aphrodite does in Homer (Il 3.390–94). Paris thus exercises the passive power that beautiful women wield so often, with or without their consent—the kind of power the Trojan elders attribute to Helen in the Iliad. The declaration of Helen’s own surpassing beauty opens her to the prospect of objectification in her own right, but this prospect is left unacknowledged. Unlike Alcaeus or Ibycus, Sappho insists in the strongest terms on Helen’s beauty, but she conveys its erotic power only obliquely, by asserting the beauty of anything that arouses erōs. She ostentatiously avoids presenting Helen as a (destructive) object of male desire, instead allowing her to retain both her beauty and her agency.

needed some more achilles in my life