The Politics of Place in Colluthus' Abduction of Helen

Colluthus’ 'Abduction of Helen' depicts Paris as a shepherd who leaves his native Trojan mountains on an audacious sea-journey, touring the monuments of Sparta and bearing back to his homeland a Helen who fantasises about seeing the spectacular walls of Troy. This article explores how Colluthus’ poem meditates on place and belonging, spatial movement, and shifting centres of power in the late antique world. The poem’s interest in mobility, monuments, cities, and citizenship is read in light of the contemporary genres of encomium, epigram, and patria, and its interest in space and movement is traced through its evocation of the alternative topographical possibilities associated with pastoral, epic, and epyllion. The Abduction of Helen emerges as a poem in which layered landscapes forge connections between past and present, in which spatial boundaries are demarcated and then symbolically transgressed, and in which the mythical history of urban space is freighted with a powerful political resonance.