Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who’s the fairest of them all?”

The legend of Helen of Troy is different from the myth of Helen of Troy. Legend has it that Helen, wife to Menelaus of Sparta, was either abducted by, or eloped with, a prince of Troy named Paris. The myth is a horse of another colour, as it were.

Three goddesses of ancient Greece, Athena, Hera and Aphrodite, all covet a special kind of apple inscribed with the words:  “For the fairest”:  since, presumably, all goddesses are assumed to be beautiful, being superior to ordinary mortals. Zeus, the chief among the gods, asks Paris to be the judge of this ‘first beauty contest’.

As participants will, the goddesses each offer Paris a bribe. Athena, the warrior goddess and patron deity of Athens, promises him victory in battle; Hera, wife to Zeus, promises him a happy married life; while Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, promises him ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ And so the myth of ‘the most beautiful’ is born, holding us in thrall even today across the globe.

Greek thoughts

The ancient Greeks prized physical good looks, health and vitality.  Consequently, their sculpture idealises the human body: celebrating proportion, balance, grace and dynamism in physique.

These renowned woks of sculpture are full of movement even in their stillness.  While the earlier works recall Egyptian characteristics in the rigid positioning of the limbs and the ‘archaic smile’ of yore, a gentle melancholy suffuses the faces of some of the later works. At work was the Greek humanism that would result in that splendour of civilisation known as fifth century Athens.

Not just good looks

There is, however, a catch. After you have contemplated one of these classical statues for any length of time (it could be years, even), you may grow aware that there is nothing more there.

The statue may be gloriously perfect and whole, but it is an end in itself — and it is finite as your own self. On the other hand, do but gaze at an equally perfect Chola bronze of southern India; or a perfectly executed head of the Buddha from, say, Central Asia.

They are not about physical beauty and perfection alone. While mirroring these attributes (albeit in stylization, perhaps), they also lead you into another realm of the intellect and the spirit. Indeed, they are an aid to meditation even like the Kalachakra and other mandalas or geometric patterns.

It has been said that we are programmed to admire and relate to whatever is possessed of a certain mathematical proportion; that mathematical calculations are inseparable from what we know of as beauty.

Hence, we are naturally drawn to people with even features, a pleasing complexion, a well-proportioned body and so forth. Good-looking people, especially when young, get pampered by the world far more than their plainer counterparts do.

Here is a catch still. A friend of mine said to me recently, “she has one of the most beautiful faces I’ve seen anywhere!  And yet, there’s nothing behind it—it’s all so bland….”  I tended to agree. In fact, I had watched a television interview wherein another celebrated actress, almost as beautiful, ended up by saying any number of inane things. I was forced to switch channels to some programme of greater interest.

‘Beauty is boring’

Aubrey Menen, in writing about Venice, remarks that beauty tends to pall. In that sense, Sophia Loren has also said that beauty is boring.  Outstanding physical beauty has this mesmeric quality in that you tend to gaze upon it until you are sated. Either you do not hear what it is actually saying, or else it is not worth the hearing.

During an interview, writer Zadie Smith used the phrase, “when I’m old and ugly….”  Apparently, ‘old’ equals ‘ugly’ in popular perception.  Here comes that catch yet. I have seen photographs of my mother taken in London even before she met and married my father.

She looks breathtakingly beautiful in those early portraits, with the ‘flourish of youth’ set upon her unlined brow. I also knew her when she was 60, not silver-haired yet but greying; and she looked, in my eyes, not one whit less beautiful.

Indeed, her very name was ‘Sundari’.  There radiated from her strong and clear features a transcendent beauty that issued forth from her gallant and indomitable spirit.  She was never, at any age, less than beautiful.

We have bought into the Greek myth lock, stock and barrel. We kowtow to international beauty pageants, which spell big business. We keep pushing back the limits of what is, and what is not, acceptably decent and modest attire for women until that most abbreviated ‘garment’ called the bikini rules over beaches, catwalks and fevered minds.

Getting obsessed

The body beautiful, with nothing to offer beyond itself, is the ruling ‘icon’. Most women agonise over their appearance and grow obsessed with some abstract notions regarding how they ought to look.  This syndrome is nothing new but is perhaps more pronounced today than ever before.

Are the Olympian gods and goddesses of ancient Greece having the last laugh?

For there is the tale of ‘Ashtavakra’, trapped in a deformed and twisted body but possessed of intellectual and spiritual genius. In our own times, there is Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, a physicist in a class by himself. We bestow upon physical beauty ‘the garland briefer than a girl’s.’ How do we garland beauty of the mind and the spirit—if, indeed, we have it in us to recognise it in the first place?

It may be worth recalling that the man who sang of the most beautiful woman in the world, Greek poet Homer, was born blind.