'The same theme is taken up in the Agamemnon [406, 749], but this time it is the amorous pothos for Helen that, having mastered Menelaus' heart, peoples the palace abandoned by his wife with phantoms [phasmata] of the beloved, with her apparitions in dreams [oneirophantoi]. Radiant with charm, haunting and elusive, Helen is like a person from the beyond, doubled in this life and on this earth in herself and her phantom, her eidolon. A fatal beauty created by Zeus to destroy human beings, to make them kill one another at the walls of Troy, she, more so than her sister Clytemnestra, deserves the appellation "slayer of men" [Euripides, Helen 52-55; Electra 1282-84; Orestes 16]. She who is "most beautiful" also incarnates horrible Erinys, the savage and murderous Ker. In her, desire and death are joined and intimately mixed.'
J.P. Vernant & A. Doueihi. 1986. 'Feminine Figures of Death in Greece' Diacritics, 16(2), 54–64.

















