The rap sheet of Pandora is long, the beautiful devilry of her seductive charms blamed for liberating all the evils of mankind. The original femme fatale, she kept nothing on her bedside table but a box full of hope.
Helen had more of the victim about her. Hatched from the egg of Zeus, kidnapped by lusty Athenians, courted by Gods and monsters, and raped by Paris, she now stands prostrate in cracked marble watching the tourist trade glance by.
You can find these heroines, these contradictory models of womanhood, not in Grecian fields of weatherworn ruins, but sitting primly in the great sculpture hall of the Victoria and Albert museum. (Just after ye olde gift shoppe, innit.) No man has flung themselves at their feet for some time. Few look upon them now as the goddesses they once were. From their modern vantage point, it's just a daily procession of list-ticking sightseers and the unseeing galleratti. They're long since used to being overlooked.
Perhaps why they were so happy to be sketched.
Wouldn't you just kill for one of those mythological profiles?
