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.
Helen and Her Sisters (Meidias Painter hydria, detail of the Tyndarid group)
Attributed to the Meidias Painter, c. 430–420 BC
A closer view of the Kerameikos hydria's shoulder frieze isolates the clustered Tyndarid sisters in the Meidias Painter's fine-line manner. Phylonoe belongs to this named Spartan group beside Helen — one of the few ancient images in which the princess Artemis made immortal can be read among her siblings rather than lost in a generic gathering of women.
Helen and Her Sisters (Meidias Painter hydria, alternate angle)
Attributed to the Meidias Painter, c. 430–420 BC
Another museum photograph of the same Meidias Painter hydria in Athens (Kerameikos 2712) shows the Helen-and-sisters tableau from a further angle, clarifying the crowded late-fifth-century composition in which Phylonoe appears. For a figure attested in little more than Apollodorus's note of Artemis's gift of immortality, these Kerameikos plates remain the visual record.