Who was Helen of Troy?

Daughter of Zeus, queen of Sparta

In the myth Helen is the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, though the early epic Cypria names the goddess Nemesis as her mother (what does “nemesis” mean?). Her sister Clytemnestra married Agamemnon of Mycenae; her brothers were Castor and Polydeuces. So many princes came to court her that her father feared the losers would make war, a story told in what started the Trojan War? She married Menelaus, who became king of Sparta, and they had a daughter, Hermione.

Taken, or willing?

The poets never settled it. In the summary of the Cypria, Aphrodite brings Paris and Helen together while Menelaus is away in Crete, and the two load great treasures aboard and sail by night. Sappho, around 600 BC, held her up as a woman who left the best of husbands for love. Homer’s Helen, in Troy, blames herself. On the walls, pointing out the Greek chiefs to old Priam, who has just told her he blames the gods and not her, she answers:

would that I had chosen death rather than to have come here with your son, far from my bridal chamber, my friends, my darling daughter, and all the companions of my girlhood.

Back home in the Odyssey, she blames “the wrong that Venus had done me” (4.261), Venus being Butler’s Roman name for Aphrodite. The orator Gorgias later wrote a whole speech in her defense: whether gods, force, persuasion or love had moved her, he argued, she was not to blame.

The Helen who never reached Troy

A stranger version runs alongside Homer’s. The poet Stesichorus was said to have lost his sight for slandering her and to have recovered it by singing that she never sailed to Troy (Plato, Phaedrus 243a). Herodotus heard from Egyptian priests that storms drove Paris to Egypt, where King Proteus kept Helen safe for the whole war. He believed them, reasoning that Priam would have handed her over rather than lose his sons and his city (2.112–120). Euripides built a play on it, Helen (412 BC), in which the gods send a phantom to Troy while the real woman waits by the Nile.

After the war

When Troy fell, Menelaus found her and took her home. The Odyssey shows them years later in their palace at Sparta, receiving Odysseus’s son Telemachus: Homer calls her “Jove’s daughter Helen,” and she slips into the wine a drug from Egypt that takes away all grief. Spartans honored Helen and Menelaus together at a shrine at Therapne, near Sparta, whose ruins archaeologists call the Menelaion. There is no evidence that a historical Helen lived; there is plenty of evidence that people worshipped her.

The face that launched a thousand ships

Homer’s Catalogue of Ships adds up to 1,186 vessels (Iliad 2). The round thousand belongs to Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus, printed in 1604, asks of her ghost: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Homer gives her a quieter image. When the messenger goddess Iris finds her in Iliad 3, Helen is weaving a great purple web, embroidering, Homer says, the battles fought for her sake between Trojans and Greeks.