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Register to attend online 232 Seats Remaining
Helen first appears in the poems of Homer, after which she became a popular figure in Greek literature.
* Use this link to join our virtual program: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82235295222
March is Women's History Month.
She is the most beautiful woman in the world. She is the daughter of a god. She is the cause of a war. She ran away; she was kidnapped; she never went to Troy at all. Few mythic names have captivated readers and thinkers so enduringly as that of Helen of Troy, famed for her remarkable beauty and her troubling behavior. Often regarded in contemporary literature as equal parts casus belli and femme fatale, Helen is the subject of centuries’ worth of debate surrounding whether she was kidnapped or left willingly for Troy and what her elusive mythic figure really represents. This program will provide an outline of the myth as it appears in antiquity, as well as an introduction to the interpretations and re-interpretations of Helen in the millennia since she first appeared at her loom in Homer’s "Iliad". We will discuss the potential Indo-European origins of the myth, the conflicting ancient accounts of Helen’s life and mysterious death, and the most famous presentations of her—ancient and modern—as we explore how it is that one woman can be the source of a thousand stories.
Presenter: Gabrielle Roehr is a doctoral candidate in Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with high honors in Classics and a minor in Art History from New York University in May of 2020. Her senior thesis, titled “The Archaic Present: Nostalgia and Ideology in the Age of Augustus,” examined the intersection of art and politics and the creation and maintenance of ideology in Augustan Rome, with special attention paid to Vergil’s Aeneid, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, the Forum Augustum, and the Monumentum Ancyranum. She began the PhD program in Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in September of the same year. Her research interests include narrative and
storytelling in Greek and Latin poetry, the relationship between weaving and poetry, and contemporary reception of ancient myth. Her in-progress dissertation (working title: “A Thousand Stories: Helen and Narrative Tension and Instability”) examines Helen of Troy as narrator and object of narrative in Homer, Attic tragedy, and Latin poetry as well as in twentieth and twenty-first century anglophone adaptations of the Helen myth.
At the conclusion of the program please feel free to take a brief online survey here: https://www.projectoutcome.org/responses/81442
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