Ruby Blondell

Three millennia after the myth of Helen, our relationship to female beauty remains deeply ambivalent, fraught with both desire and danger. We worship and fear it, advertise it everywhere yet try desperately to control and contain it. In Helen of Troy Ruby Blondell investigates the origins of our persistent anxiety about female beauty, focusing on this key figure from ancient Greek culture in a way that both extends our understanding of that culture and provides a useful perspective on our own. Moving from Homer and Hesiod to Sappho, Aeschylus, Euripides, and others, Blondell offers a fresh examination of the paradoxes and ambiguities that Helen embodies. Other mythic women may be more violent but none wreaks more havoc than Helen. She is simultaneously the most desirable and most destructive. She causes the greatest war of all time when she elopes with the Trojan prince Paris, bringing her Greek husband, Menelaus, and thousands of Greek warriors in hot pursuit. Blondellshows that this is Helen's mythic essence: the beauty is inalienable, the destruction inevitable. For ancient Greeks, female beauty is an awe-inspiring, supremely desirable gift from the gods, essential to the perpetuation of a man's name through reproduction; yet it also grants women terrifying power over men, posing a threat inseparable from its allure. Three thousand years later, contemporary culture remains almost obsessively preoccupied with all the power and danger of female beauty and sexuality that Helen represents. Considering all aspects of the Helen myth - including the archaeological record, which contains evidence of her status as a cult figure, worshipped by maidens and newlyweds alike - Helen of Troy holds up a fascinating mirror to our own time.

Beauty, Myth, Devastation

Helen of Troy

Ann Cumming

Auricula Meretricula, 2nd Edition

Sophocles

A new translation by Ruby Blondell. The close translation and notes are designed to provide access to the original work in highly readable English. For both students and the general reader.

Translation with Notes, Introduction and Essay

Sophocles' King Oidipous

English translation of Sophocles' tragic story of Antigone addresses civil disobedience and a moral imperative which supercedes human-created laws. The Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide access to understanding Greek culture.

Sophocles' Antigone

Mary Whitlock Blundell

This book is a detailed study of five plays of Sophocles that examines a key ethical principle.

A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics

Helping Friends and Harming Enemies

Kirk Ormand

Ancient Sex: New Essays presents groundbreaking work in a post-Foucauldian mode on sexuality, sexual identities, and gender identities in ancient Greece and Rome. Since the production of Foucault's History of Sexuality, the field of classics has been caught in a recursive loop of argument regarding the existence--or lack thereof--of "sexuality" (particularly "homosexuality") as a meaningful cultural concept for ancient Greece and Rome. Much of the argument concerning these issues, however, has failed to engage with the central argument of Foucault's work, namely, the assertion that sexuality as we understand it is the correlative of a historically specific form of medical and legal discourse that emerged only in the late nineteenth century. Rather than reopening old debates, Ancient Sex takes up Foucault's call for discursive analysis and elucidates some of the ways that ancient Greek and Roman texts and visual arts articulate a culturally specific discourse about sexual matters. Each contributor presupposes that sexual and gendered identities are discursively produced, and teases out some of the ways that the Greeks and Romans spoke and thought about these issues. Comprising essays by emerging and established scholars, this volume emphasizes in particular: sexual discourses about women; the interaction between sexual identities and class status; gender as an unstable discursive category (even in antiquity); and the relationships between ancient and modern sexual categories.

New Essays

Ancient Sex

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz

Bella Vivante

Mary-Kay Gamel

Women on the Edge, a collection of Alcestis, Medea, Helen, and Iphegenia at Aulis, provides a broad sample of Euripides' plays focusing on women, and spans the chronology of his surviving works, from the earliest, to his last, incomplete, and posthumously produced masterpiece. Each play shows women in various roles--slave, unmarried girl, devoted wife, alienated wife, mother, daughter--providing a range of evidence about the kinds of meaning and effects the category woman conveyed in ancient Athens. The female protagonists in these plays test the boundaries--literal and conceptual--of their lives. Although women are often represented in tragedy as powerful and free in their thoughts, speech and actions, real Athenian women were apparently expected to live unseen and silent, under control of fathers and husbands, with little political or economic power. Women in tragedy often disrupt "normal" life by their words and actions: they speak out boldly, tell lies, cause public unrest, violate custom, defy orders, even kill. Female characters in tragedy take actions, and raise issues central to the plays in which they appear, sometimes in strong opposition to male characters. The four plays in this collection offer examples of women who support the status quo and women who oppose and disrupt it; sometimes these are the same characters.

Ruby Blondell

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