Leda and the Swan

In 412 BC the Athenians watched a new play by Euripides, Helen. In its opening speech Helen tells the story of her own birth. Zeus, she says, came to her mother Leda in the shape of a swan, pretending to flee from an eagle, and won her by that trick.

A generation later the sculptor Timotheos turned that very moment into a statue. He was much in demand. The building accounts of the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, carved in stone around 380 BC, record payments to him, and he later worked on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. His Leda lifts her cloak with one arm like a screen and with the other holds the swan close, sheltering it from the bird of prey.

The original is lost, but the composition was a favourite in Rome. More than two dozen Roman marble copies survive, this one among them. The best known stands in the Capitoline Museums in Rome.