Helen

The daughters and sons of Leda

Helen is a daughter of Zeus. The fullest account of her birth comes from Apollodorus, a later writer who retold the Greek myths, and he gives two versions.

In the main one, a single night has two fathers. Zeus comes to Leda in the form of a swan, and her husband Tyndareus also sleeps with her. Leda bears Pollux and Helen to Zeus, and Castor and Clytaemnestra to Tyndareus.

In the second version, the goddess Nemesis tries to escape Zeus by turning into a goose. Zeus chases her as a swan. An egg from their union is carried to Leda, who raises the child. Here Leda is a foster mother and Nemesis is the woman Zeus pursues.

The playwright Euripides has Helen name Leda as her mother, while she doubts whether the swan story is true. Neither he nor Apollodorus settles the question of her parents.

Taken as a girl by Theseus

Helen is carried off once before Paris takes her to Troy. The story is told by the writer Plutarch.

While Helen is still too young to marry, the hero Theseus and his friend Pirithous seize her as she dances at the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta. Theseus hides her in the town of Aphidnae and leaves his mother Aethra to guard her. Then he goes with Pirithous to try to carry off Persephone.

The brothers of Helen learn where she is hidden from a man named Academus. They storm Aphidnae and take her back. In return they carry Aethra off as a captive. Apollodorus also records the rescue.

So the story of Helen holds an earlier abduction before the one that starts the Trojan War. While she is still a child, men choose her, hide her and fight over her.

Helen at Troy

In the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the war, Helen is inside Troy. She sits in a hall and weaves the battles outside into a purple cloth. The poem does not keep her apart from the violence attached to her name. She watches the Greeks and Trojans fight. She points out the Greek commanders to the Trojan Priam, and she speaks of the shame she carries.

Later Greek writers asked a bolder question: what if Helen never came to Troy at all?

This question decides what anyone can blame her for. The Helen of Homer is inside the city and understands what her presence costs. In Stesichorus, Herodotus and Euripides, the armies fight over an image while the real woman waits in Egypt.

The Helen who stayed in Egypt

Stesichorus, an early Greek poet, is said to have lost his sight for speaking ill of Helen. According to the story, he then wrote a correction, which the philosopher Plato quotes. In it, Helen did not board the ships and never reached Troy.

The historian Herodotus turns that denial into an argument. Egyptian priests tell him that King Proteus kept Helen safe near the Nile, while Paris sailed on without her. Herodotus uses lines from Homer about Paris’s voyage to Sidon as proof that the poet knew this version.

Euripides shows how it could happen. The goddess Hera makes a living likeness of Helen out of cloud for Paris to carry away. The god Hermes takes the real Helen to Egypt. So Menelaus, her husband, and the Greeks spend ten years fighting for something that has Helen’s looks but not her body. This version does not excuse the war by blaming someone else. It makes the whole siege depend on a substitute made by a god, which no fighter can recognise.

Two places that claimed her death

Therapne, above the river Eurotas, claimed the graves of Helen and Menelaus together. Excavation of the shrine began in 1909. It stood over older Mycenaean remains and was rebuilt in the fifth century BC. Worship at the shrine kept the royal couple together after their return home.

Rhodes ends her life another way. Pausanias, a Greek travel writer, says that after Menelaus dies, his sons drive Helen out of Sparta. She asks for protection from Polyxo, whose husband died at Troy. But Polyxo sends servants dressed as the Furies, spirits of punishment, to seize Helen while she bathes and hang her from a tree. The people of Rhodes then found a shrine to Helen Dendritis, Helen of the Tree.

Therapne buries her beside Menelaus. Rhodes leaves her hanging from a tree, punished for a war that several sources say she never went to.