Alatiel and Helen: War Caused by Beauty?

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

7 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

04/24/2007

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Humanities/philosophy

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Summary :

Introduction
The first evidence that Euripides' play is not going to follow the traditional account of Helen
1. Abrupt change in the story from its expected course
Euripides' Helen and the question of the relation of language to metaphor
The divine gift of Theonoe
The story of Alatiel in the second day of Boccaccio's Decameron
The mercantile view
Conclusion
Works cited and consulted

Abstract

Few 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.