Theocritus’ Helen gets herself married

There is an important generic permeability between the epithalamic and epic registers from the earliest extant examples of these genres. Homeric epic, for instance, adopts the epithalamium to evoke marital situations, as it does in the “Teichoskopia” and Nausicaa episodes (Hague 1983; Karanika 2013). In turn, Sappho’s hexameters appear in her wedding songs – e.g., frr. 105V, 106V (Liberman 2007; Faraone 2020) –, which can also be epicizing – e.g., fr. 111V (Killeen 1973; Meister 2019) –, at the same time that she composed poems that merged one and the other, as fr. 44V (Schrenk 1994; Spelman 2017). This trend will be picked up by later authors. Catullus, for instance, compares Vibia and Manlius (poem 61), to Aphrodite and Paris; and Vibia and their child, to Penelope and Telemachus, marking that the wedding is an event of epic proportions for the woman (Ready 2004; Feeney 2013).

By composing an epithalamium for an epic heroine, something unique in the epithalamic tradition, Theocritus takes this trend to a different place. In his 18^th Idyll, he presents a chorus who performs in front of the bedroom of Helen and Menelaus after they have been locked inside to consummate their union. This paper explores the amalgamation of Helens – lyrical and epic – that Theocritus proposes. I argue that Theocritus’ hybridization of genres aims at creating a Helen who reflects an epithalamic imperative of marital harmony on the one hand, while reminding his audience that her wedding holds the inception of much disunity and destruction. For Theocritus asks of his reader the following question: can the different figurations of Helen ever be reconciled?

I start by examining the positive side of Helen: this Spartan girl who outshines the other youths of her chorus recalls Alcman, and in the choral performance of Stesichorus this heroine is blameless, and has deep ties to Egypt, which would have animated Theocritus’ audience (Acosta-Hughes 2010; Barone 2010). But can Helen be seen in a positive light once the other versions of the tale are considered (Kyriakou 2008)? Hence, I turn to her basket and web, evocative of two important presentations of the heroine: an Iliadic one, where she resentfully weaves the destruction she has caused, and an Odyssean one, of domestic calm after the war (Pantelia 1995; Lamari 2008). Finally, I explore the ever-looming presence of Sappho, which elicits a Helen full of agency, who chose to abandon a prosperous house and family, the opposite of an epithalamic ideal (duBois 1996; Blondell 2010; Dodson-Robinson 2010). Theocritus’ Helen conjures up exactly the complexity of treatment of the character in Greek myth: she can be an adulterous instigator, but also blameless and homely. Theocritus allows these versions to coexist because the palimpsest of versions reveals something about both epithalamium and epic. The first highlights that the woman, too, is subjected to battles and journeys because of the wedding, while the second, traditionally understood as a masculine genre, frequently conceals the stake of the woman when it comes to setting men in their epic quests.