Alatiel and Helen: War Caused by Beauty?
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humanities/philosophy
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published 24/04/2007
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SummaryFew storylines are more familiar than that of the woman so beautiful that men cannot resist her and will stop short of nothing, even murder or treachery, to possess her. The most famous of these women is of course, Helen, with “the face that launched a thousand ships,” many of which came back empty after the Trojan War. Reviled by antiquity for her role in that war which caused the death of so many of Greece’s finest men, Helen was also condemned for her adulterous—and sometimes seen as all-too-willing—relationship with her abductor, Paris. Euripides, however, in his play, Helen, picks up the apologetic version of her tale from Stesichoros’ “Palinode to Helen” and claims that she in fact never went to Troy, but was spirited away to Egypt where she remained chaste and secure. This rendering of her story protects Helen’s metaphorical/mythological status from Paris and a public opinion that would try to reduce her to a physical object. The princess Alatiel, however, in II, 7 of Boccaccio’s Decameron, has no such defense, and despite, or perhaps because of her physical experience of love with nine different men, she fails to become a candidate for metaphor. The death and destruction in these stories is not, then, caused by the incomparable beauty of these two women, but by their struggle to maintain or attain a higher ontological order.
Table of Contents
- The woman so beautiful that men cannot resist her
- Helen begins her story as already secure in the love
- Euripides abruptly changes the story from its expected course
- The rest of the play focuses on removing Helen from the dangers of the naturalist king
- One of the recurring elements in the story is her lack of speech.
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