#blondell

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.

Night Nurse

Helen, as we saw, speaks of herself as a “statue” (agalma) (262), and the same word is used for her double (705, 1219). Similarly, when Theonoe calls the double a mimēma, or artistic “imitation” (875), she is echoing language used earlier by Teucer when he first lays eyes on Helen. Believing her to be a stranger, he calls her “the murderous image of a woman” — which correctly describes the eidōlon — and perceives her as an “imitation” (mimēma) of the Helen who was fought over at Troy (72–75).

Is it really true, however, that Helen’s act is presented with disapproval in this poem? Many scholars have argued, to the contrary, that Sappho is celebrating the active assertion of female desire. Certainly, the poem emphasizes Helen’s erotic agency to an unprecedented degree. Like Alcaeus in his fragment 283, it does so in part by appropriating aspects of Helen’s own voice from the Iliad. [...] The poem thus resembles Alcaeus 283 in drawing upon Helen’s own perspective in the Iliad , by acknowledging her transgression while ascribing it to a combination of divine influence and her own agency. In comparison with Alcaeus, however, Sappho puts considerably more emphasis on the latter. She does so largely by demoting Paris from Alcaeus’s active “deceiver of his host” to the nameless object of Helen’s desire.

Castor informs us that Helen will be worshipped as a goddess after she “reaches the end of her life” (1666–69)—a careful locution, which avoids suggesting that she ever actually grows old or dies. Nor will this Helen be limited to the conventional gender role seemingly embraced by her human persona [in Euripides' Helen]. There is no indication that she will accompany her husband to the Isles of the Blessed or be linked with him in cult. On the contrary, Castor specifies that she will be honored with ritual feasts at her brothers’ side (1668). The divine Helen will, it seems, be active independently of her husband, transcending the geographical and ideological constraints of her human marriage. The woman who is most beautiful and best defies such limitations to become a goddess exempt from the rules restricting ordinary women’s lives.