τί δράσω;

✨My version of the “Abduction of Helen”, which is my contribution to @singomusezine, last volume coming out in July, as you know, full of great fellow artists drawing Greek Mythology awesomeness.

I chose this episode from The Iliad, Book III as the theme of the zine this year is about The Trojan War and all related.

🍏🦢 Paris and Helen of Sparta/Troy.

Not only that the language itself sounds straight out of a marvel forcibly funny haha moment, but Menelaus? The Menelaus who all thoughout human history, from Homer, to Sappho, to Euripides, to Virgil, to Shakespeare, to Brooke, to Barth; from Classical vases to Medieval poetry to Reinessance art, has been known as the man whose sword fell from his hands at the sight of his wife after 10 years apart?

"What joy for me to hold my wife" Menelaus?

"He flung the sword away, and kissed her feet" Menelaus?

"I believe all. I understand nothing. I love you" Menelaus?

"I have no fault to find; my wife, he daughter of Zeus and Leda, is mine again, she whom her brothers on their snow-white steeds, whilst torches blazed, made my happy bride, but gods removed her from my home." Menelaus?

The Menelaus who was picked out of the suitors by Helen herself? The Menelaus who couldn't kill a begging Trojan so his brother had to do it for him? The Menelaus who rescued Odysseus and got out Patroclus' body? The Menelaus who volounteered to fight Paris one on one so everybody could go home? Who kept expressing his guilt about himself being the cause of war through every assembly he spoke at in the Iliad? Who after 10 years away at Troy, took his wife through a 7-year long journey at sea back home, where he reinstated her as the queen of Sparta? Who wept like a child in front of Telemachus recalling the war and his brother and all the friends he lost and the only consolation being his wife' gentle hand on his?

You want me to believe that man scarred Helen's face and called her only worth half the ships because of it?

The language of this passage tickles me in a good way. Helen going “The wife of Zeus destroyed me” (self pity/sorrow, stark awareness, distancing Menelaus from the destruction) to Menelaus going “what evil did she make for us” (bewilderment, referring to them as a unit, the “evil” Hera made is shared between them)

In a simple way, Menelaus remind Helen she is not alone in her grief, in her suffering, as they are married and share the same sorrow, as this passage points out: Where there are two, one cannot be wretched and one not.

But, in this film, the ending where Odysseus departs on another likely gruelling voyage really is based on the Homeric text ⬇️⬇️⬇️

In Bk 11, Teiresias commands Odysseus in the Underworld to leave Ithaca: "After you slay the suitors in your palace, whether through trickery or out in the open with sharp bronze, then must you go with your well-fitted oar until you reach the men who do not know the sea." (11.119-23)