for you know how we cherished you

My sister took more photos of my dress. I am very happy with how this turned out :)))))

There's just SO much tension between Menelaus and Helen in Odyssey 4!!! She tells a story about how she was always on the Achaeans' side and helped them from within Troy, then he tells a story about how she was working with the Trojans to actively set a trap for the Greeks and tried to get him personally (among others) killed, then she drugs everyone at dinner. Is one of those stories a lie? Are both of them lies? This is not a portrait of a happy marriage or of a man who's just so in love with his wife that he's put the events of the past twenty years behind him! You have to wonder what exactly Helen is suppressing with those drugs of hers that are νηπενθές τʼ ἄχολόν τε, κακῶν ἐπίληθον ἁπάντων, "against sorrow and against anger, causing forgetfulness of all evils." I think (in part) that she's suppressing other narrative possibilities for their relationship, because we know in many accounts Menelaus does intend to kill Helen and comes very close to doing it.

Like look at the Trojan Women, where Menelaus is deciding between killing Helen right there at Troy or bringing her back to Greece to kill her there, and the scene ends with him assuring Hecuba that she won't have a chance to seduce him into sparing her life because she'll be on a different ship. The audience presumably knows that he will indeed end changing his mind, as mentioned in Andromache (627-631). I don't think there are any versions where Menelaus actually does kill Helen (although there were some weird local Helen cult-myths on Rhodes), but both his intention to kill her and her convincing him otherwise by baring her breasts are older traditions that Euripides is working with, not things he invented.

The Odyssey doesn't directly allude to that post-sack moment but I do think it's absolutely behind the text, and it's what Helen's suppressing with her drugs. Can't let Menelaus remember what happened during the war for too long, or he'll be overcome by rage as well as grief. The only things keeping that marriage together are 1) the drugs and 2) the fact that she's Zeus's daughter. He can't harm Zeus's daughter, especially not in the Odyssey where his status is premised upon his being Zeus's son-in-law (according to Proteus). So Helen has several kinds of power over him that prevent him from moving toward the other narrative possibility of outright killing her.

Season 8: odo returns, and he can do noses now! this is the result of contract negotiations with rene. “gotta have a nose now” said rene. they give odo a hundred noses. now hair & makeup takes four times as long. “odo forgets noses” s8e04.

Hmm, not quite! In my mind she’d look a bit like the actress Berrak Tüzünataç but with darker eyes and curlier hair*. In my own design (with very, very badly drawn Bronze Age Anatolian clothing lol) she’d look like this 👇🏽

—-

Long did Dior gaze upon the Silmaril, which his father and mother had brought beyond hope out of the terror of Morgoth; and his grief was great that death had come upon them so soon...

Then Dior arose, and about his neck he clasped the Nauglamír; and now he appeared as the fairest of all the children of the world, of threefold race: of the Edain, and of the Eldar, and of the Maiar of the Blessed Realm.

On the one hand I don't actually at all care for (especially what seems like specifically movie adaptations doing this) Menelaus as the old, ugly, abusive husband. (But if that's what it takes to keep the unquestionably reciprocated and positive Helen/Paris in adaptations, then that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.) And I also don't really care for the implication in the new Odyssey movie that Menelaus was the one to mutilate Helen.

On the other hand, certain parts of the community wringing their hands about how "Menelaos would NEVER" etc and so on, especially if they then bring up Euripides' Helen makes me roll my eyes and feel like I'm owed damages.

Because the way the "Reclamation of Helen" most often goes in the sources (visual and text) that have survived to us is certainly not some heartfelt reunion. The Odyssey's Sparta scenes, especially the first one, has a marked split in how it can be/is read, and that means one half "reconciled, happy marriage" and one half "these people are NOT in a good relationship".

And then there's Euripides' Helen.

Where Teucer tells us Menelaos dragged (what he thought was) Helen out from Troy by the hair.

A queen at the long fall of her empire