The Iliad ends before the fall of Troy, so much of Helen’s story comes to us from other sources. Late in the war, after Paris had been killed, Helen married another Trojan prince, Deiphobus. According to the poet Hesiod, who lived around 800 BCE, Helen and Deiphobus were the parents of a son, Nicostratus.
After the taking of Troy, Menelaus went in search of his wife with the intention of killing her for her faithlessness. In a scene frequently depicted on Greek vases, when he found Helen, she removed her robe and stood naked in front of him. He took one look at her beauty and the sword dropped from his hand.
The Odyssey, another epic poem attributed to Homer, gives a glimpse of the couple’s home life back in Sparta in the years after the Trojan War. Helen is once again an obedient wife, but underlying tensions in her relationship with Menelaus are hinted at in a pair of stories that the couple tell separately to Telemachus, a guest who has come seeking news of his father Odysseus.
In Helen’s story, she was loyal to the Greeks. For example, she says that she had recognized Odysseus when he disguised himself as a beggar to spy on Troy. When she realized it was the Greek king, she treated him well. Menelaus, on the other hand, answered with a story in which Helen teased the men inside the Trojan horse by
Helen in Egypt
Egypt appears in several ways in Helen's story, not least in a version of the myth in which Helen never actually went to Troy. At the beginning of his Histories, Greek writer Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE) traces the origins of hostility between Greece and Anatolia (Troy) to the stealing of Helen, and later tells of her stay in Egypt. In the Odyssey Homer says that, while attempting to return to Sparta, Menelaus and Helen are blown off course to Egypt, where they become guests of the king and are given many rich gifts.
In Helen, a play by Euripides (c. 486-c. 406 BCE), a phantom Helen goes to Troy while the woman herself stays in Egypt, where she is the guest of the king. The play begins as Menelaus arrives, conveniently at just the moment when Helen can no longer resist the king's demands to marry her. She meets Menelaus, who has been traveling with the phantom Helen, and confusion ensues. Once matters are cleared up, she tricks the king into letting her go back to Greece with Menelaus.
This alternate version of Helen's story dates back to a poem on the Trojan War by poet Stesichorus (fl. 600-550 BCE). In Stesichorus's poem Helen went willingly with Paris to Troy. According to legend, the poet was stricken with blindness as punishment for this slander against Helen. Stesichorus then wrote a palinode (recantation) in which he corrects himself and says that Helen actually never went to Troy. His revision worked and the poet recovered his sight.
Using a divine talent she possessed to imitate the voices of their wives. She nearly induced them to betray themselves, but Odysseus prevented them by clamping a hand over their mouths. While each of these stories glorifies Odysseus in some way, they also reveal Helen’s uncanny powers of recognition and imitation, as well as the difficulty of determining to whom she was loyal. In the same episode Helen eased the painful memories of all present by adding a drug to the wine. This drug, a gift from an Egyptian queen, called to mind a detour that Helen and Menelaus took on the way back from Troy (see box).
Throughout the Odyssey, as Odysseus struggles to return home and his wife, Penelope, resists the attentions of her many suitors, Helen and her sister, Clytemnestra, stand as cautionary figures for them both. In the underworld, Odysseus was warned by Agamemnon that he must return stealthily to his home on the island of Ithaca in case his wife turned out to be treacherous like Clytemnestra. Meanwhile Penelope strove to be a faithful wife in the face of great odds, and not a faithless one like Helen.
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