Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman to have ever lived. “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” wrote Christopher Marlowe.
Absence of description amplifies her beauty far beyond anything to which mere prose could aspire; the golden ratio humbled. The fevered minds of men paint her in their own image as she lingers in dreams, perfect without prescribed form or style, eschewing and embracing all.
To be declared blonde in face of a preference for brunettes would be her undoing; nobody remembers the world’s second most beautiful woman. The superlative is more than plenty, no need to dress it.
Like a real estate agent at a Potemkin village, minds conspire to fill in the gaps, rendering the unseen favourably with the wishful airbrush of imagination. Whatever the goal, imagination puts its shoulder to the wheel. Hope is merely a question of heart and happiness always around the next bend.
As long as a dream remains a dream, it holds eternal promise. Gifts piled beneath the tree at Christmas speak to the child of untold joy until opened to reveal earthly realities and the constraints of a family budget.
Fake news infused myths told over millennia settle only on beautiful and all roads lead there however they are paved. Helen of Troy née Sparta who was seduced or raped and then eloped with or was abducted by Paris, was nothing if not ambiguous.
Cheerleading for the Greeks as they laid siege to Troy, or conversely their tormentor whilst they sat hidden inside their wooden horse pining for home. Wandering lonely and bereft among the ruins of Troy or returning to Sparta to live out her days happily reconciled with forgiving husband Menelaus following their brief hiatus – ‘truth isn’t truth’. His attempt on her life thwarted by a glimpse of her beautiful shoulder despite having already perished in battle.
She may have been taken up to Olympus to spend the afterlife tending Achilles’ heel, while further alibis have her in Egypt throughout the war, never setting foot in Troy. Some even dare claim she was hung from a tree on Rhodes.
Whatever her fate, she was beautiful. Mean, nasty, self seeking and treacherous though all the while a saintly victim of capricious gods and men. Cruelly misunderstood but thriving on the burning desires of hearts and minds and always just out of reach.
She is intangible and all things to all men, defying description whilst holding aloft the promise of tomorrow. Those who seek to pin her down are left with just the crude spectre of their own fantasy cowering gnarled and warped, playing chicken with reality. Her true face though unseen brings only longing to those who have overdosed on ingrained self regard and too little return on belief.
Helen was a home wrecker and heartbreaker but she sure was pretty and that gave her the edge over real life when times got hard.
