HELEN

Helen, or Helene, was a mythic heroine in ancient Greece and a local divinity in Sparta. Reputed to have been the most beautiful woman of her time, and possibly of all time, Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and the lover of Paris, a prince of Troy. Her abduction by Paris caused the Trojan War, and as a result she is almost always called Helen of Troy. Helen is the subject of several plays and poems, and according to one, at the time of her death she was made immortal by Zeus.

Helen’s beauty is credited with causing the Trojan War—“the face that launch’d a thousand ships” according to playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564—1593). She was the daughter of the Greek queen Leda and either Zeus or Tyndareos, a mortal. The uncertainty surrounding the true identity of Helen’s father lies in the myth of Zeus and Leda. Zeus fell in love with Leda, the wife of King Tyndareos, and transformed himself into a swan in order to mate with her. The children of this union were Helen and her brother, Pollux. On the same night Tyndareos made love to Leda and she became pregnant by him with Clytemnestra and Castor, who were mortal. The brothers became known as the Dioscuri, or “sons of Zeus.” In antiquity, several places in Greece claimed to display the egg from which Helen was hatched.

Another older but less common version of the story has Nemesis, goddess of retribution, as Helen’s mother, making Helen the daughter of two divine parents. In this version, in which Zeus was also said to have used the swan disguise, Helen was given to Leda to raise as her daughter. Nemesis was a divine personification of the punishment that awaits those who step out of bounds and commit the crime of hybris (exaggerated pride).The role of Nemesis as mother of Helen connects with a tradition that makes the Trojan War a form of divine retribution against mortals.

According to Stesichorus (fl. 600—550 BCE), a poet of ancient Greece, Helen’s mortal father, Tyndareos, forgot to perform a sacrifice of thanks to the goddess Aphrodite during his wedding. Angry at the mortal’s mistake, the goddess punished him by making his daughters faithless to their husbands: Helen was unfaithful to Menelaus and Clytemnestra murdered her husband, Agamemnon. Even as a young girl Helen’s beauty made her vulnerable. In one myth she was carried off by Theseus, the Greek hero and slayer of the Minotaur, but was reclaimed by her brothers before any harm could come to her. Another similar version has it that as a result of her relationship with Theseus, Helen was the mother of Iphigeneia and entrusted the young girl to her sister, Clytemnestra, who was married and who raised the girl as her own. Most other accounts of Iphigeneia have Clytemnestra and Agamemnon as her real parents.

When Helen was a young woman, the news of her beauty spread throughout Greece, and as a result she had many suitors, especially from powerful, aristocratic families. Not wanting the young men’s competition for Helen to cause strife, Tyndareos made her many suitors swear to support the claim of whomever Helen chose to marry and to avenge any attempts to take her from her legitimate spouse. In the end Helen married Menelaus, a son of Atreus of Argos, and they had a daughter, Hermione.