Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Hilaira.
The gallery
The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
Peter Paul Rubens (with Jan Wildens), c. 1617-1618
In this Baroque masterpiece, Rubens seizes the most charged instant of the myth: the divine twins Castor and Pollux, charmed by the beauty of the Leucippides, sweep Hilaeira and her sister Phoebe up onto rearing horses. The composition spirals around the entangled bodies of the abductors and the struggling women, their pale flesh luminous against the dark steeds, while cherubs steady the horses. Rubens transforms the violent abduction into a dynamic interlace of muscle, drapery, and motion. The canvas (224 x 210.5 cm), painted with Jan Wildens supplying the landscape, hangs in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and remains the most celebrated depiction of the daughters of Leucippus in Western art.
Sarcophagus Depicting Castor and Pollux Seizing the Daughters of Leucippus
Unknown (Roman), c. 160 CE
This carved marble Roman sarcophagus relief, dating to about 160 CE, unfolds the abduction of the Leucippides across its front. Castor and Pollux are shown lifting Hilaeira and Phoebe, the daughters of Leucippus, the dramatic seizure rendered in the agitated, deeply undercut relief style favored in mid-second-century funerary sculpture. The mythic scene of a beauty carried off into a new and sudden fate suited the consolatory purpose of a tomb. Now in the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, it preserves an ancient witness to the very myth in which Hilaeira is named.
Attic Red-Figure Hydria: The Rape of the Leucippides
Meidias Painter, c. 420–400 BC
On this celebrated Attic red-figure hydria in the British Museum (E 224), the Meidias Painter stages the abduction of Hilaeira and Phoebe in the rich, crowded manner of late Classical vase-painting. The Dioscuri seize the daughters of Leucippus amid a throng of named companions, their names once inscribed beside the figures so that Hilaeira herself can be read in the scene. The vase is among the earliest and finest surviving images of the Leucippides myth, and it remains the canonical ancient counterpart to Rubens's later Baroque treatment of the same seizure.