Helen of Troy
Helen of Troy was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Around the year 1604, the playwright Christopher Marlowe gave her the line most people still know. In Doctor Faustus, a character asks whether this was the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium. The question carries an old anxiety. It is unclear whether the line marvels at her beauty or registers disappointment that she is not more beautiful still. For a figure so famous, Helen is strangely hard to see. The poet Homer never described her with any specifics. He noted only that she had white skin, a phrase scholars read as a marker of aristocratic women who stayed indoors, out of the sun. Out of that blankness, centuries of writers and painters built a person. Who was her father, a god or a king? Did she go to Troy willingly, or was she carried off against her will? Was she ever in Troy at all? And what happened to her when the war she caused was over? The answers contradict each other at almost every turn, because Helen was never one story. She was a goddess worshipped beside a river, an egg hung in ribbons from a temple roof, and a name whose very origins still defeat the people who study them.
The etymology of Helen's name remains an open problem. In the 19th century, Georg Curtius linked Ἑλένη to Selene, the moon. That neat idea ran into trouble. Two early dedications to Helen, written in the Laconian dialect, spell her name with an initial digamma, a letter probably sounded like a w. That spelling rules out any origin beginning with a simple s sound. In the early 20th century, Émile Boisacq proposed that the name came from a noun meaning torch. Another suggestion connected it to the root behind Venus. Linda Lee Clader weighed these and found that none offers much satisfaction. Otto Skutsch later argued something stranger. The name Helen, he proposed, might hold two separate etymologies belonging to two different figures. One is a Spartan goddess tied to natural light, especially the glow sailors call St. Elmo's fire, and sister of the Dioscuri. The other is a vegetation goddess worshipped at Therapne as Helena of the Trees. Others connect the name to a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European sun goddess, noting links to words for sun across Indo-European cultures, including Helios. Martin L. West proposed that Helena means mistress of sunlight, built on a suffix meaning mistress of, naming a deity who controls a natural element. Still other researchers consider the etymology simply impossible to determine, which leaves the most famous woman in Greek myth without a settled name.
In most sources, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, Helen is the daughter of Zeus and Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus. The most familiar version of her birth comes from a play by Euripides written in the late 5th century BC. Zeus, in the form of a swan, was chased by an eagle and sought refuge with Leda. The swan won her affection, the two mated, and Leda produced an egg from which Helen emerged. The number of eggs and their cargo shift from author to author. The First Vatican Mythographer describes two eggs, one holding Castor and Pollux, the other Helen and Clytemnestra, yet the same writer elsewhere says all three came from a single egg. Fabius Planciades Fulgentius also puts Helen, Castor and Pollux in one egg. Pseudo-Apollodorus reports that Leda lay with both Zeus and Tyndareus on the night Helen was conceived. A different parentage survives in the Cypria, part of the Epic Cycle, where Helen is the daughter of Zeus and the goddess Nemesis. Nemesis did not want him. She changed into animals to flee, finally becoming a goose, and Zeus became a goose too and raped her. From the egg she produced, Helen was born. Later writers explain how the egg reached Leda. A shepherd found it in a grove in Attica, or Hermes dropped it into her lap. Asclepiades of Tragilos and Pseudo-Eratosthenes told nearly the same tale with swans rather than geese. Timothy Gantz suggested the swan tradition grew out of this bird version. The egg was treated as real. Pausanias records that in the middle of the 2nd century AD, an egg-shell tied up in ribbons still hung from a temple roof on the Spartan acropolis, believed to be the very egg Leda brought forth.
When it was time for Helen to marry, kings and princes came from around the world to seek her hand, carrying rich gifts or sending emissaries. Tyndareus was afraid. He did not dare choose a husband or turn anyone away, for fear of giving grounds for a quarrel among powerful men. Odysseus, who had brought no gifts because he thought he had little chance, offered a solution in exchange for help courting Penelope, daughter of Icarius. He proposed that every suitor swear a solemn oath to defend the chosen husband against anyone who quarreled with him. This is the Oath of Tyndareus. Once the suitors swore not to retaliate, Menelaus was chosen, because he was the greatest in possessions and had offered the most gifts. He had not even attended, sending his brother Agamemnon to represent him. To mark the pact, Tyndareus sacrificed a horse. Helen and Menelaus became rulers of Sparta after Tyndareus and Leda abdicated, and ruled for at least ten years. The marriage marks the beginning of the end of the age of heroes. Concluding his catalog of suitors, Hesiod reports Zeus' plan to wipe out the race of men, the heroes in particular. The Trojan War would be his means to that end, and the oath the suitors swore would be the mechanism that dragged them all into it.
Paris, a Trojan prince, came to Sparta to claim Helen under the guise of a diplomatic mission. He arrived with a promise already made to him. Zeus had appointed him to judge the most beautiful goddess among Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world, and Paris chose her, earning the lasting wrath of the other two. What happened next is the central dispute of Helen's story. Although she is sometimes shown forcibly abducted, most Ancient Greek sources, following Homer, held that Helen fell in love with Paris and went to Troy willingly. In Homer she says she followed Paris, or that Aphrodite led her there. Herodotus writes that Paris carried her off but also got her to fly with him. The Cypria says only that after Paris gave gifts, Aphrodite brought the Spartan queen together with the prince. Apollodorus says Paris persuaded her, and Sappho argues she willingly left behind Menelaus and her daughter Hermione. Dio Chrysostom rejects the whole frame, making Paris a suitor who won her fairly with the full consent of her family and took her to Troy. The scholar Ruby Blondell, in Helen of Troy: Myth, Beauty, Devastation, notes that none of the surviving sources claims Paris took Helen by force against her will. Her complicity, Blondell writes, is essential to her story. The two reached Troy in three days, according to the Cypria, and consummated their passion either at the small island of Kranai or, by another account, the night before they left Sparta.
At least three Ancient Greek authors denied that Helen ever went to Troy. Euripides, Stesichorus and Herodotus held instead that she spent the war in Egypt. In the version Euripides gives in his play Helen, Hera made a likeness of Helen out of clouds at Zeus' request. Hermes carried the real woman to Egypt, and only the phantom went to Troy. The Greek word for this likeness is eidolon. It appears in Stesichorus as well, and Lycophron states that Hesiod was the first to mention Helen's eidolon. Herodotus offers a more grounded version, backed by his own travel. He went to Egypt and interviewed the priests of a temple at Memphis. According to them, strong winds blew Paris's ship off course and Helen arrived in Egypt soon after leaving Sparta. King Proteus, appalled that Paris had seduced his host's wife and plundered his host's home, refused to let him take Helen on to Troy. Paris went home without his bride. The Greeks, refusing to believe Helen was not inside the walls, besieged the city anyway, while she waited in Memphis for ten years. After the war Menelaus sailed to Memphis, where Proteus reunited him with his wife. Hostile winds then trapped his ships, and Menelaus sacrificed two Egyptian children before sailing home, a detail that lets a darker portrait of him slip through.
Homer paints a poignant, lonely picture of Helen in Troy. She is filled with self-loathing and regret for what she has caused, and by the end of the war the Trojans have come to hate her. When Hector dies she is the third mourner at his funeral. She says that of all the Trojans only Hector and Priam were ever gentle or kind to her, and that all other men shudder at her. Her bitterness extends to her own choice. She wishes aloud that she had been wife to a better man, one who could feel the indignation of his fellows, and she calls Paris's conduct folly. After Paris was killed in combat, the Trojans disputed which of Priam's surviving sons should marry her, Helenus or Deiphobus, and she was given to Deiphobus. During the fall of the city her role turns ambiguous and treacherous. In Virgil's Aeneid, Deiphobus describes how she feigned Bacchic rites when the Trojan Horse entered the city. She led a chorus of Trojan women, held a torch among them, and signaled to the Greeks from the central tower. Homer's Odyssey tells it differently. There she circled the Horse three times, imitating the voices of the Greek wives left at home, tormenting the men hidden inside, Odysseus and Menelaus among them. By Virgil's account she also hid Deiphobus's sword as the sack began, leaving him defenseless before Menelaus and Odysseus. Aeneas later meets the mutilated Deiphobus in Hades, his wounds a testimony to her final act of betrayal.
Menelaus found Helen hiding from him, and in several accounts he raised his sword to kill her. In Quintus Smyrnaeus, Aphrodite knocked the blade from his hand and stirred desire in him, making him spare her. In other sources Helen dropped her robe from her shoulders, and the sight of her breasts made him let go of the sword. The same motif spreads beyond Menelaus. Stesichorus wrote that Greeks and Trojans alike gathered to stone Helen to death, and when they saw her face they too dropped their weapons. Helen's ultimate fate splits along several paths. In the Odyssey she returns to Sparta and lives with Menelaus, seemingly reconciled, telling anecdotes of her life at Troy when Telemachus visits in Book 4. In Euripides' Orestes, Apollo saves her and she is taken up to Mount Olympus almost at once, made a sea goddess who watches over sailors beside Castor and Pollux. Pausanias preserves a grimmer ending. After Menelaus died, his sons drove Helen from the palace, so she went to Rhodes to an old friend, Polyxo, wife of Tlepolemus. Tlepolemus had died in the Trojan War, leaving Polyxo a widow who secretly resented Helen. Polyxo welcomed her warmly, then while Helen relaxed in a bath sent handmaidens dressed as Furies to seize her and hang her from a tree. From then the Rhodians worshipped her as Helen of the Tree, Helene Dendritis, a title that returns her to the role of a vegetation goddess and binds her death to a place where her name was still spoken in prayer.
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Common questions
Who was Helen of Troy in Greek mythology?
Helen of Troy, also called Helen of Sparta and in Latin Helena, was a figure in Greek mythology said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She was first married to King Menelaus of Sparta, and her later marriage to Paris of Troy was the most immediate cause of the Trojan War.
Who were Helen of Troy's parents?
In most sources, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus. In the Cypria she is instead the daughter of Zeus and the goddess Nemesis, and several writers describe her being born from an egg.
Did Helen of Troy go to Troy willingly or was she abducted?
Most Ancient Greek sources, following Homer, held that Helen fell in love with Paris and went to Troy willingly. The scholar Ruby Blondell notes that none of the surviving sources claims Paris took Helen by force against her will, though some later versions depict her as forcibly abducted.
What was the Oath of Tyndareus and how did it cause the Trojan War?
The Oath of Tyndareus was a solemn promise, proposed by Odysseus, in which all of Helen's suitors swore to defend her chosen husband against anyone who quarreled with him. When Paris took Helen, Menelaus called on the suitors to fulfill that oath, which began the Trojan War.
Did Helen of Troy stay in Egypt during the Trojan War?
At least three Ancient Greek authors, Euripides, Stesichorus and Herodotus, denied that Helen ever went to Troy and said she spent the war in Egypt. In Euripides' version Hera made a likeness of Helen from clouds, and Hermes took the real woman to Egypt, where she waited in Memphis for ten years.
How did Helen of Troy die?
Helen's fate varies by source. Pausanias records that after Menelaus died, his sons drove her out and she fled to Rhodes, where Polyxo had handmaidens dressed as Furies hang her from a tree. In other versions she is taken up to Mount Olympus and made a sea goddess, or she simply returns to Sparta and lives with Menelaus.
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