Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

by Natalie Haynes

A Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, tells us Helen was ten years old at the time of this abduction,9 but she surpassed all in beauty. Adding three years to Helen’s age makes the story no more palatable, at least to us. The notion of a child being more beautiful than all other women or girls, and this being a valid reason to kidnap her, is a deeply unsavoury one.

Perhaps this simply reflects a cultural readiness to accept the destructive nature of female beauty, whereas we tend not to think about male beauty in that way.