Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Phylonoe.
The gallery
Helen and Her Sisters (red-figure hydria, Meidias Painter)
Attributed to the Meidias Painter, c. 430–420 BC
This Attic red-figure hydria, attributed to the Meidias Painter and dated to the closing decades of the fifth century BC, gathers the daughters of Tyndareus and Leda in a graceful Spartan tableau. Among the elegantly rendered figures is Phylonoe, shown leaning tenderly on the shoulder of her famous sister Helen — a rare surviving depiction of the otherwise shadowy princess whom, according to Apollodorus, the goddess Artemis made immortal. The vase, now in the Kerameikos Archaeological Museum in Athens, exemplifies the Meidias Painter's hallmark delicacy of line and crowded, lyrical compositions, and offers one of the very few visual records of a figure known almost entirely from a single line of myth.