In the book, Let There Be Clothes: 40,000 Years of Fashion, Lynn Schnurnberger describes the “typical day of a Greek housewife” thus: “7:05 — Rises. 7:08 — Eats small piece of bread soaked in wine. Is still hungry, but must be careful about her figure. 7:09 — Pecks husband on cheek and sends him off to the agora. Sighs. Looks at the four bare (slightly tinted) walls. Rarely allowed out of the house, she prepares for another day at home.... 8:30 — All dressed up with no place to go, she wanders into the kitchen, eyes a piece of honey cake. Resists.... 12:15 — Husband arrives, chiding her about the foolishness of make-up. Pretends to agree. Husband leaves at 12:22. 3:00 — Instructs daughter on her duties of being a wife. 8:05 — Husband and wife sit down at low table to dinner; bread, oil, wine, a few figs, small portion of fish (only 320 calories) and beans. She hears about his day. He tells her she should not bother about the affairs of men.... She is too hungry to argue. 10:10 — Falls asleep. Does not dream of tomorrow.”

Notwithstanding the tongue-in-cheek quality of this account, it cannot be denied that there is some truth in it. Democracy might have originated in Athens in Greece, but women, like slaves, were not considered a part of the electorate. No wonder then that most of the prominent women in Greek mythology — whether a doomed girl such as Cassandra or a vengeful wife such as Medea — are thwarted figures who linger on the margins.

The most beautiful woman in Greece was Helen, on whom rests the onus of having caused the Trojan War. She was half-divine, being the daughter of Zeus and the mortal Leda. Her sister was Clytemnestra, of husband-slaying fame. In spite of having such a formidable genealogy, Helen disappears after the Trojan War. If, as some legends say, she led the rest of her days in wedded bliss with her rather dull husband, Menelaus, then it cannot be said that she had an enviable life. Her notorious sister, Clytemnestra, although discredited as a ‘manly woman’ by Aeschylus, still had some credit as a mother, since it was the sacrifice of her daughter, Iphigenia, that spurred her on to kill her husband, Agamemnon. But one does not associate even the softer emotions of motherhood with Helen. It is as if history wiped her off collective memory once she had performed her role of launching a thousand ships loaded with heroes.

Of all the portraits of Helen, the one I like the best is by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Frederick Sandys. His Helen is a pouty-lipped, podgy lady who looks more like a child than a mature woman. With an unspecified hurt in her eyes, she scowls at somebody outside the frame — perhaps Paris, perhaps Menelaus, perhaps history. The artist, much like the author who inscribed Helen’s story in her face and then forgot her, has to find a way of containing her rage even as he acknowledges it, lest it becomes threatening like Clytemnestra’s. So he makes her childlike — angry, yet powerless.