The Breasts that Launched a Thousand Ships
Helen’s face is up here, thanks
How do you create an artistic representation of the most beautiful woman to have ever existed? The challenge of how to depict Helen of Troy—a recurring theme throughout Eidolon’s ‘Helen and her Eidolon’ anniversary event — was also confronted by the Greek painter Zeuxis. Zeuxis was unable to find any woman beautiful enough to be a suitable model for his Helen, so he selected five exceptionally beautiful women and combined the most attractive features of each.
Zeuxis was a real artist who lived in the second half of the fifth century BCE. The story of ‘Zeuxis Selecting Models’ may well be apocryphal, but it has been an inspiring subject for many later artists. The appeal is obvious — how better to reflect on one’s own art than to capture the image of an early artist struggling to create satisfactory art? In the parlance of our time: it’s so meta.
Zeuxis’ solution feels like a familiar one in the Buzzfeed age of ‘This Artist Combined the Faces of Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson and the Results are STUNNING’ (yes, someone actually did that). One internet-famous artist specializes in mashups of celebrity faces. The message seems to be that when you take the average of one gorgeous human being’s face and another gorgeous human being’s face, you end up with a face even more gorgeous than either of the originals. Combine the faces of Elizabeth Taylor, Irene Papas, and Diane Kruger, and maybe you approach Helen of Troy.
But mashing up faces may not be enough to access the source of Helen’s allure. One story about Helen tells how, after the Greeks defeated the Trojans, Menelaus planned to execute her. But when he saw her, he was so struck by her beauty that he dropped his sword. Some versions of the story include a key extra detail: Menelaus dropped his sword not when he saw Helen’s face, but when she revealed her breasts. This version of the story appears in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, where the Spartan woman Lampito speaks in support of the sex strike by saying it will be just like how Menelaus threw down his sword when he saw Helen’s “apples” (155–6). Euripides goes even further in the Andromache when Peleus rips into Menelaus (627–30):
And when you took Troy —oh yes, I went there! — you didn’t kill [Helen] when you had her in your grasp, but when you saw her breast you threw down your sword and let her kiss you. You fawned over that betraying bitch…
We’re used to thinking of Helen as having, as Christopher Marlowe wrote, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” But ancient evidence suggests that Helen’s breasts were at least as important as her bone structure.
Many of the painters who have chosen to depict Zeuxis Selecting Models have picked up on this aspect of Helen’s appeal. Consider this version by Giorgio Vasari:
The most striking element of this painting is not the beauty of Zeuxis’ models’ faces. Actually, since no woman is really facing the viewer — Vasari was apparently partial to painting women looking down and to the side — we’re only treated to portions of their faces (and, in the case of the woman to the far left, no face at all). What we can see, on full view, are their breasts. So many breasts.
In case the importance of breasts weren’t obvious enough, on the right side of the painting we can see a depiction of the famous breast-covered statue of Artemis at Ephesus. Vasari even settles the question of whether the protuberances are breasts, eggs, or testicles by adding what appear to be areolae. (Interestingly, the other, larger depiction of Ephesian Artemis in the Casa Vasari is more equivocal on that issue.) Zeuxis is, as an artist attempting to paint Helen, making an aesthetic choice about what constitutes beauty, and his inclinations on that subject are perfectly clear.
Nor is the emphasis on breasts unique to Vasari: it seems to be a common feature of many paintings of Zeuxis Selecting Models that Zeuxis is more interested in real estate below the neck:
In the Vincent painting, the placement of Zeuxis’ hand and the servant woman collecting the clothes on the floor seem to suggest that he instructed the prospective model to strip for him. And the crying woman on the right seems to have been told that her beauty doesn’t measure up — much to the annoyance of the scowling woman in yellow comforting her, who is my favorite part of the entire painting. Mottez’ approach is similar but includes the extra-creepy addition of a screen to give Zeuxis the ability to assess the models’ beauty in private.
For me, these images of Zeuxis attempting to depict Helen — paintings filled with nude, emotional women eager to prove their beauty is sufficient — come closer to accessing the source of Helen’s appeal than the many paintings of Helen standing around, looking haughty.
Helen’s eidolon may be ethereal, but her beauty is not. It has physical reality. And she deploys it strategically, choosing exactly how much nudity to reveal. The power of her bare breasts is so great that she doesn’t need to use it often: in Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius’ (1868) they become the literal flamethrowers (!) that produce the fire that will burn Troy to the ground (60–66):
‘Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the breasts,
The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword
Now over and now under, now direct,
Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down shamed
At all that beauty; and as I stared, a fire,
The fire that left a roofless Ilion,
Shot out of them, and scorch’d me that I woke.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (slightly dead-eyed) Helen seems to be playing with her neckline, possibly on the verge of baring her breasts. She knows their power; indeed, she fixates on their beauty in Rossetti’s ‘Troy Town’:
Heavenborn Helen, Sparta’s queen,
(O Troy Town!)
Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,
The sun and moon of the heart’s desire:
All Love’s lordship lay between.
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)…
‘Yea, for my bosom here I sue;
(O Troy Town!)
Thou must give it where ’tis due,
Give it there to the heart’s desire.
Whom do I give my bosom to?
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)
In ‘Troy Town’ Helen also offers Aphrodite a cup in the shape of her breast — positioning her, as in Ezra Pound’s Canto 106, as Marie Antoinette’s predecessor in apocryphal versions of the origin of the shape of the champagne coupe. (I highly recommend this excellent and well-researched Eater article on myths about the coupe.) But the size and shape of the coupe does perhaps gesture toward Helen’s likely ‘cup size’, so to speak, which would likely have been small by today’s standards — sorry, Reddit.
Helen’s breast-as-cup is fascinating because it provides a way to ‘drink’ from the breast in a way that still treats it as an aesthetic and sexual object rather than a nutritive, milk-producing one. As a society, we are more comfortable with the former function than the latter, and perhaps the Greeks felt similarly. Although Helen’s original form may been as a Spartan fertility goddess rather than mythic heroine, her relative lack of fertility — a single daughter back in Sparta, Hermione, who nobody ever seems to think about — shows that the power of her breasts does not come from their ability to feed an infant. Perhaps it is for this reason that when Helen’s sister Clytemnestra bares her breast to her son Orestes to keep him from killing her, she fails to convince him as Helen did Menelaus.
But the power of Helen’s breasts to affect men also makes them frightening. If they could stop Menelaus from executing her, even a less perfect pair could wreak havoc. It would be better for society, the thinking goes, if women were to keep their upper halves clothed.
Helen may be more relevant now than ever. In the age of Free The Nipple, a campaign fighting to make the unclothed female chest as socially acceptable as the unclothed male chest, Helen reminds us of the danger of giving breasts too much power. When we insist that they remain covered, an unexpectedly bare breast may become a ship-launching flamethrower.
Donna Zuckerberg is the editor-in-chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014 and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her first book, Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.
