Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Phoebe.
The gallery
The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
Peter Paul Rubens (landscape by Jan Wildens), c. 1618
Rubens' celebrated canvas, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, depicts the violent carrying-off of the two Leucippides — Phoebe and her sister Hilaeira, the daughters of Leucippus of Messenia — by the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Phoebe is one of the two struggling women lifted from the ground into the saddle: the mortal Castor, armored on a steadier horse, and the bare-chested Pollux on a rearing mount seize the sisters in a swirling diagonal knot of bodies, while putti steady the horses. The myth, in which Phoebe was abducted from her betrothed cousin and later bore Mnesileos to Pollux, became in Rubens' hands the defining image of the episode in European art, a Baroque showpiece of intertwined male and female nudes and kinetic energy.
Sarcophagus with Castor and Pollux Seizing the Daughters of Leucippus (Walters Sarcophagus)
Unknown (Roman), c. 160 CE
This Roman marble sarcophagus relief, now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, carves the abduction of the Leucippides across its front. Phoebe and Hilaeira, daughters of Leucippus, are swept up by the mounted Dioscuri amid a crowded frieze of struggling figures. The carrying-off of the sisters — a scene of rapture and transition — was a favored subject for funerary art, where the Dioscuri's own movement between mortality and the heavens, and Phoebe's seizure into the family of the immortals, carried consoling hopes for the deceased.
Sarcophagus with the Abduction of the Leucippides (Vatican Relief)
Unknown (Roman), c. 160 CE
On this Roman sarcophagus relief in the Vatican Museums (Inv. 2796), the rape of the Leucippides unfolds in a dense, agitated frieze: Castor and Pollux on horseback sweep up Phoebe and Hilaeira while attendants and onlookers crowd the scene of struggle and rescue. Phoebe, one of the two seized brides, embodies the moment of forcible passage into the household of the Dioscuri. The subject's themes of abduction, struggle, and transformation made it a recurring choice for Roman tomb sculpture, echoing the twins' shuttling between death and the stars.