Un battito di ciglia. La bellezza come antidoto alla guerra.

As in many other cultures, the Ancient Greeks considered a beautiful woman as potentially dangerous, because she could be the cause of conflict. On the other hand, not only are the ‘good wives’ of heroic characters praised for their beauty and their virtues, but they are also shown as being strongly opposed to war, as attested in several poetic, literary and dramatic examples, including Camilleri’s works. Inspired by one of the author’s most poetic definitions, the paper examines a series of ancient texts where war intertwines with the lives of famous women: Penelope, Andromache, and Helen, Menelaus’ unfaithful wife, who is often blamed for the Trojan war. As the paper will show, she actually has many other faces: she is both the victim of Aphrodite’s will, the archetype of the phenomenon currently known as ‘victim blaming’, and also the heroine of Euripides’ Helen: the ‘new Helen’ as Aristophanes calls her in his comedy Thesmophoriazusae (411 BCE). The analysis is completed by the study of Lysistrata, another comedy of the same year, in which Aristophanes imagines how feminine seduction and beauty may function as an antidote to war