Unveiling Gestures in Colluthus’s 'Abduction of Helen'

'Aidos', Female Sexuality, and Rape

Authors

  • India Watkins Nattermann University of Cologne

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.21761

Keywords:

Colluthus, veiling, aidōs, rape, embodied emotion and gesture, female sexuality, Helen of Troy

Abstract

This article examines the repeated gestures of unveiling in Colluthus’s 5th-century ce epyllion, The Abduction of Helen. In the ancient Greek psychological framework, veiling is situated within embodied discourses on aidos (sexualized shame), marriage, and rape, and is linked with another repeated image: opened doors. I read Colluthus’s text as a rape narrative that is simultaneously conveyed and complicated through the multivalent symbols of the veil and door. Colluthus uses metaphoric language to express female characters’ responses to Helen’s abduction and to trace an arc through the poem from childlike innocence, to sexualized behavior and shamelessness, to destruction. By linking these contrasting psychological states, Colluthus complicates the poem’s depiction of female sexuality. Furthermore, Colluthus elides the poem’s central crisis – Helen’s abduction and her own response to it – and instead frames it with this imagery to open up interpretative possibilities for the entire poem: does Helen go willingly, or is she raped?

Author Biography

  • India Watkins Nattermann, University of Cologne

    India Watkins Nattermann studies the body and identity in antiquity using new, theoretical approaches (such as critical race theory and feminist psychoanalysis). She recently completed her Ph.D at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation that read the wounded, dismembered male body of Julio-Claudian literature as a broken signifier and an expression of a crisis of elite masculinity in the shift from Republic to Empire. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne, where she is organizing an international conference on boundaries in Flavian poetry. In addition to imperial Latin literature, her research interests include Roman Comedy and Greek historiography.

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Published

2024-12-30

How to Cite

Watkins Nattermann, I. (2024). Unveiling Gestures in Colluthus’s ’Abduction of Helen’: ’Aidos’, Female Sexuality, and Rape. Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 9(1), 51-69. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.21761