All that remains of the great classical Greek tragedies are their skeletons. Euripides never intended for his works to be stripped down to just the dialogue; they were once performed with the help of bright costumes and choral song to enthusiastic audiences. Theater is a visual, even physical medium, but very little trace of this comes across through mere words on a page. Much has been lost.

This does not mean, however, that classical works are obsolete. The themes of classical works such as Euripides' Helen are still relevant and challenging to a modern audience. The visual, physical sense of the play can be captured in new ways — an opportunity to bring ancient masterpieces into modernity. Graphic art reinvented ancient Norse mythology through Thor’s reincarnation as a superhero; so ancient Greek culture can also be made anew. Visual images in place of theatrical performance can bring the timeless themes of these works back into the spotlight and give them new life for a modern audience.

When I first began translating and illustrating ancient texts back in my sophomore year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it was something of a pet project. My old high school art teacher had taught a unit on graphic art years before, and I thought it might make an interesting juxtaposition — old stories in a modern medium. An instructor in the Classics Department encouraged me to start taking my hobby more seriously. She turned out to have a point: last spring, I published my first piece in the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics. We know that at least one other classicist has produced similar work, since Classical Inquiries recently published Glynnis Fawkes' illustrations of Gregory Nagy's translations of Sappho. Nagy, who teaches in the Classics Department at Harvard University, created this translation as an “experiment,” and it ended up being a resounding success. The poetry is beautifully complemented by Fawkes’ artwork, which helps to reclaim the performative aspect of ancient poetry.

In my experience, the study of classics and ancient languages in general are often regarded as somewhat elitist. After all, relatively few people can invest the time and expense necessary to become proficient in Greek or Latin because neither necessarily leads to a reliable career path. But graphic art is easily digestible and can make the classical canon much more accessible than straight translation can. It presents rather alien material in a familiar, uncomplicated way even to those with little or no background in classics.

Though not exactly new, graphic art and its offshoots are having their heyday. From monolithic Marvel blockbusters to the television phenomenon The Walking Dead (based on the series of graphic novels by Robert Kirkman), it is clear that graphic art has had an incredible impact on popular culture, which makes it comfortingly familiar to many, if not most, millennials. Graphic art gains immediacy through manipulated perspective and exaggeration — features that lend themselves well to storytelling. It can thus attract readers who, while interested in graphic art, might not otherwise have become interested in Greek tragedy. This is a valuable tool for classicists because it may open up the conversation about ancient literature to the δῆμος at large. Graphic artists can use image and perspective to recreate, if not the vision of ancient authors, then the spirit of their work.

Hunting through texts for verbal clues to set the scene, so to speak, is challenging but surprisingly similar to arranging the mise-en-scène for a play. Just as with theater, much of the work of imagining the action and setting of a sequence has been displaced from the consumers to the producers of the medium. Large panels place readers securely in the setting, which in Helen’s case is Egypt. Graphic art does not ask the reader to picture what this might look like. I, as the illustrator, have researched and created an image for them so that they can instead focus on the central plot of the text. Faces make characters almost tangible, and dynamic shifts in frame accommodate an active storyline.

The theme of self vs. appearance saturates the text and can only be enhanced by visuals. But drafting these images takes careful thought and interpretation. Helen bemoans in lines 262–4 that she cannot alter her beauty, nor has she any control over others’ perception of her. Her appearance and the phantom that bears her image are conflated with her person and character. A beautiful face, then, is required of Helen; yet the design thereof is completely at my own discretion. This presents quite a challenge: how does one draw the most beautiful woman in the world? For me, the answer came from a Google Image search of “Jennifer Lawrence.” Others, I’m sure, would have come up with many different muses, but what matters is that the interpretation clearly illustrates the distinction between who Helen is and how she looks. Jennifer Lawrence has an appropriately lovely countenance which works well for the piece and fills in the gap that a bare text leaves.

Ironically, by giving Helen back her face I can amplify her voice. It humanizes her story despite the thousands of years that intervene between the play’s debut and now. Hatred of her beauty, a fluke of nature totally irrelevant to her personality, is a major theme of the piece. Nevertheless her appearance became her identity, and today it is her redemption. As I mentioned above, graphic art revitalized the ancient Norse god Thor, launching him into blockbusters and headlines worldwide starting from his reinterpretation by Marvel Comics as a super hero in the 1960s (Arnold, Thor: Myth to Marvel p. 155). A similar makeover can make Helen a person again:

While Helen’s anguish can be understood from the text itself, graphic art brings her crisis home. We can see her pitiful circumstance, her complete inability to control any aspect of her own life. She is a queen reduced to sleeping outside on a bed of straw with her hand on a tomb in order to fend off unwanted romantic advances — a forced marriage, which in modern terms indicates rape. All of this is described in the play but an actor in Euripides’ day would not merely stand motionless before an audience reciting his lines. He would gesture and move about, or play with his tone and inflection. A script can’t bring this to life, but graphic art can try.

In some ways the readers can relate to her plight. Helen feels responsible for events that are not really within her control. (Though to be fair, inadvertently causing a decade-long war is perhaps more dramatic than most readers’ personal histories.) But Helen’s behavior is not at fault; her troubles are caused by the conflation of her body and her person — a familiar concept to many women. Her lovely body, an unalterable reality of her existence, is her only apparent crime. For, as she says, Aphrodite offered Paris it in marriage, not her.

The commodification of beauty was evidently relevant in ancient times, yet it is also very much felt now. Helen addresses an issue we still face and perhaps always will. Art communicates Helen’s frustration and our own as she tries quite literally to wipe off her features without success. Her story may especially speak to female readers and represent our often marginalized voices in the midst of the mostly male readership of graphic art (Arnold p. 155). Incidentally, this parallels Helen’s origins, for the tragedy's protofeminist themes were likely lost in its debut in front of the Dionysia's exclusively male audience. But graphic art can work in tandem with the content of Euripides’ work to bring female voices into the spotlight.

Graphic art can bring Euripides’ Helen forward into the 21st century A.D. The two are in fact well suited to each another. The visual nature of the medium can do what theatrical performance once did for the play: granting it dynamic visual appeal and reclaiming its public accessibility. Marvel realized the potential of ancient characters in graphic art decades ago with astonishing success. But Helen may bring something new to the medium by appealing to female readers of a predominantly male medium (Arnold p. 155). The potential power of blending ancient and modern art forms is apparent, and Helen has yet another story to tell.

Emily Grace Shanahan is an artist and student of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Class of 2016. She is from Polk County, North Carolina.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.