O erotismo de Helena na Ilíada: Dioniso, a perspectiva homérica e o gosto dos comentadores

Abstract

When she shows up in the Iliad, Helen is not any more erotically involved with Paris, accepting to lay down with him just because Aphrodite had obliged her to do so. If, on the one hand, Helen’s behavior seems to call into question the erotic dimension of her relation with Paris, on the other the poet will state in Iliad 24, 30 that it was the ‘feminine randiness’ (makhlosýnē) thrown upon her by Aphrodite that created her union with Paris, causing so many deaths as a consequence. Since the word makhlosýnē isn’t used nowhere else in the Homeric poems, some ancient commentators considered the possibility of athetizing the passage, because it would introduce in the poem an understanding of the erotic relation incompatible to the Iliad as a whole. Nevertheless, the explanation of this term in a scholion to the passage based on a reference to the Hesiodic fragment 132 M-W (= fr. 81 Most) adds new elements to its interpretation.