The desired and the desiring: Helen as ālambana and the courses of kāma in Homeric epic

Helen of Troy is usually read through her beauty, her abduction, and her responsibility for the war. This article asks a different question: why does the presence of one desired woman occasion such different courses of response in those who meet her, and how does each of those courses change over time? Paris's desire persists after he has possessed her and survives his humiliation; Menelaus's attachment is entangled with injury, honour, hospitality and the recovery of a household; the Trojan elders acknowledge her beauty and still wish her gone; Priam and, in Helen's own report, Hector meet her with forbearance. Helen herself has desires that are not the desire directed at her, and she is the figure who represents the war gathered around her, in the web she weaves, in the song she foresees, and in the stories she tells at Sparta. Selected concepts from Sanskrit aesthetic and philosophical traditions are used as heuristics for this reading: the distinction between the ālambana, the person who supports or occasions an emotion, and the āśraya, the person in whom it arises; Mammaṭa's account of the beloved as one cause among cooperating conditions; and the Yogasūtra's states of affliction (dormant, attenuated, interrupted, active) as a vocabulary for change over time. I argue that the encounter with a desired person does not fix the course of desire in those who meet her, that the desire aimed at Helen and her own desires run in different directions, and that representing a situation is a different thing from resolving it: Helen comes to read her circumstances with growing clarity, but she never gains the power to alter them. No historical contact between Greek and Indian traditions is claimed, and the Sanskrit categories are not presented as concepts that Homer uses.