He calls her kunōpidos – dog-faced – an insult which Helen of Sparta has thrown at herself in Homer’s Iliad. We might well wonder what the specific meaning of this insult is, since it is used of the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful goddess in these poems. It obviously cannot contain connotations of ugliness, at least not physical ugliness, which we would probably mean if we used a similar insult today. And the character of a dog in modern culture is usually presented positively: loyal, devoted, and so on.
