Achilles tells Odysseus the plan: attack Troy, bring back Helen. Odysseus asks the obvious question: does anyone actually have a sketch of what Helen looks like?
Gorgocutie says:
This is the most underrated practical problem of the Trojan War. A thousand Greek ships sailed to Troy to retrieve one woman, and nobody brought a wanted poster. The Greeks had been competing for Helen’s hand in marriage years earlier — they all knew who she was theoretically — but after a decade of war, do you really remember what someone looks like?
The joke writes itself: “We’re looking for a woman. Tall? Short? Blonde? Brunette? Who knows, just start killing Trojans and we’ll figure it out.”
In Homer’s account, Helen was so famously beautiful that when she walked along the walls of Troy, the old Trojan elders said “no shame that Trojans and Greeks suffer for such a woman.” But Homer never gives us a physical description — no eye color, no hair color, no height. The face that launched a thousand ships remains, ironically, the most undescribed face in literary history. Which makes this comic historically accurate in the most hilarious way.
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