Helen of Troy
What is the story of Helen of Troy?
Why was Helen of Troy killed?
Who did Helen of Troy love?
Helen of Troy, in Greek legend, the most beautiful woman of Greece and the indirect cause of the Trojan War. She was the daughter of Zeus, either by Leda or by Nemesis. Her name is pre-Hellenic and in cult may go back to the pre-Greek periods. Because of her divine ancestry she was sometimes regarded as a minor goddess. Helen is among the most fascinating figures in Greek mythology because of the complex and often destabilizing power of her beauty.
Mythology
Birth and family
Helen was commonly held to have been hatched from an egg laid by Leda, who was ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan. According to some accounts, her sister Clytemnestra was born from the same egg, and brothers, Castor and Pollux (known as the Dioscuri), who were also twins and were born at the same time as their sisters. Pollux was usually considered to have been fathered by Zeus, while Tyndareus, Leda’s husband and the king of Sparta, was given as the father of Clytemnestra and Castor. In a separate origin story Helen was born from the union of Nemesis and Zeus, both of whom had taken bird form (either a swan or a goose); in this version too Helen was hatched from an egg.
Abduction by Theseus
As a young girl, Helen was carried off by the hero Theseus and his friend Pirithous. The abductors then set off for the underworld with the intention of kidnapping Persephone but instead became imprisoned there. Helen, who had been left in the care of Theseus’s mother, Aethra, was rescued by her brothers. Aethra was taken captive and served Helen for many years. In some traditions Helen and Theseus were the true parents of Iphigeneia, popularly regarded as the daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. In some accounts Iphigeneia was sacrificed before the Trojan War so that the Achaean fleet could proceed on its way to Troy.
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Oath of Tyndareus and marriage to Menelaus
When Helen came of age, suitors arrived from all parts of Greece and included Odysseus, the wily king of Ithaca. Fearing that the rejected suitors would riot once Helen’s husband was selected, Tyndareus promised Odysseus the hand of Penelope, Helen’s cousin, in exchange for a plan to prevent an outbreak of violence. Odysseus consequently devised the oath of Tyndareus, in which all the suitors vowed to honor and defend Helen’s marriage to whichever candidate was successful. Menelaus, Agamemnon’s younger brother, eventually married Helen and became king of Sparta. They had a daughter, Hermione, who married Achilles’s son, Neoptolemus, and later, Orestes. In some accounts Helen and Menelaus also had two sons, Nicostratus and Pleisthenes.
Role in the Trojan War
During an absence of Menelaus, Helen fled to Troy with Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam. Paris had chosen Aphrodite as the winner of a divine beauty contest in exchange for the love of the most beautiful woman, Helen. Following Helen’s elopement (or abduction), an expeditionary force was assembled by the Greek kings who had sworn the oath of Tyndareus and their troops. Commanded by Agamemnon, the army sailed to Troy, but Priam refused to return Helen, leading to the Trojan War. When Paris was slain in battle, Helen married his brother Deiphobus, whom she betrayed to Menelaus once Troy was captured. Menelaus and Helen then returned to Sparta, where they lived happily until their deaths.
Role in the Odyssey
Helen and Menelaus entertained Telemachus when he visited Sparta seeking news of his father, Odysseus, who had not returned from the war. Helen recognized Telemachus by his resemblance to Odysseus and added a drug to his wine to lighten her guest’s grief and suffering. Helen’s ambivalent role in the sack of Troy is revealed as well: She assisted Odysseus in removing the Palladium (protective statue of Athena) from the city but also attempted to have the Greeks concealed in the Trojan horse (a hollow wooden structure that the Greeks used to gain entry into Troy) betray themselves by mimicking the voices of their wives.
Alternate stories
According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes, where she was hanged by the Rhodian queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan War. The poet Stesichorus, however, related in his second version of her story that she and Paris were driven ashore on the coast of Egypt and that Helen was detained there by King Proteus. The Helen carried on to Troy was thus a phantom, and the real one was recovered by her husband from Egypt after the war. This version of the story was used by Euripides in his play Helen.
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Interpretations: Victim or villain?
Helen has long been a divisive and ambiguous figure, defined by her extraordinary beauty and its capacity to both beguile and betray. She was worshipped and had a festival at Therapnae in Laconia; she also had a temple at Rhodes, where she was worshipped as Dendritis (the tree goddess). Like her brothers, the Dioscuri, she was a patron deity of sailors. The nature of her seduction by Paris and her culpability as the immediate cause of the Trojan War have been variously depicted—in some traditions she was cast as innocent, in others as errant. Sappho, writing in the 6th century bce, described Helen as a woman who eloped of her own accord. However, two thousand years later Renaissance and Baroque painters tended to portray her as a passive figure who had no agency in her abduction.
Under artistic scrutiny, Helen’s defining action, her infidelity, has often been demonized as complicity. In Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02) Shakespeare denounced Helen as a destructive force:
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Troyan hath been slain; since she could speak
She hath not given so many good words breath
As for her Greeks and Troyans suff’red death.
Homer’s Helen was an enigma. She fled with Paris willingly but later claimed to regret it. Despite her professed self-loathing and remorse, Priam refused to blame her for the decimation of his city. Her conflicting actions leading up to the siege of Troy obscured the truth of her loyalties. The historian Herodotus suggested that Helen had merely been a convenient excuse for the Greeks to attack a rival political power and insisted that she had never been at Troy. While Helen resists a single interpretation, her complicated narrative has been reassessed by modern feminist readings, which challenge the traditional view of her as either a scapegoat or a villain.
In popular culture
The most famous description of Helen as “the face that launch’d a thousand ships,” a reference to the Greek fleet that sailed for Troy, occurs in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1604). Edgar Allan Poe alludes to Helen of Troy in his poem “To Helen” (1831), in which he praises her “hyacinth hair” and “classic face.” In her 1995 poem “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing,” Margaret Atwood explores themes of objectification and self-determination by reimagining Helen as a burlesque dancer. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), a spoken and sung performance piece by Anne Carson, juxtaposes the stories of Helen and actress Marilyn Monroe.
Helen has been played on screen by actresses such as Elizabeth Taylor (Doctor Faustus [1967 film]), Irene Papas (The Trojan Women [1971 film]), Sienna Guillory (Helen of Troy [2003 miniseries]), and Diane Kruger (Troy [2004 film]). Lupita Nyong’o took the role in The Odyssey (2026), directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, and Robert Pattinson.
