Helen, also known as Helen of Troy or Helen of Sparta, was a figure in Greek mythology said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world. She was believed to be the daughter of Zeus by Leda or Nemesis, sister of Clytemnestra and the Dioscuri, and first wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Her marriage to the Trojan prince Paris was the most immediate cause of the Trojan War. Ancient accounts disagree on whether she went willingly or was abducted; some versions place her in Egypt for the war's duration rather than at Troy. A cult of Helen developed in Laconia, and her beauty became a lasting emblem in Western art and literature.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Helen of Troy" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family and birth
In most sources Helen is the daughter of Zeus and of Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus. Euripides and later writers popularized the story that Zeus, in the form of a swan, mated with Leda, who produced an egg from which Helen emerged. Some accounts place Castor, Pollux, and Clytemnestra in the same or a second egg. An older Epic Cycle tradition in the Cypria makes Helen the daughter of Zeus and the goddess Nemesis, who fled Zeus by changing shape until he overcame her as a goose or swan; the egg was then transferred to Leda.
Helen and Menelaus had a daughter, Hermione. Homer treats Hermione as Helen's only child; other sources add sons such as Nicostratus, Megapenthes, or Pleisthenes, sometimes attributing them instead to Menelaus by other women. Traditions that Helen bore children to Paris also circulate but conflict with Homer.
II.Youth, suitors, and marriage
In youth Helen was abducted by Theseus and Pirithous, who pledged to marry daughters of Zeus; the Dioscuri later recovered her and took Theseus's mother Aethra as captive. When Helen came of age, kings and princes competed for her hand. Odysseus advised Tyndareus to bind all suitors by the Oath of Tyndareus — a solemn pledge to defend the chosen husband if Helen were stolen — and in return Tyndareus supported Odysseus's suit for Penelope. Menelaus was chosen, and he and Helen ruled Sparta after Tyndareus abdicated.
Hesiod links the marriage of Helen and Menelaus to Zeus's plan to thin the race of heroes; the Trojan War, caused by Helen's departure with Paris, becomes the instrument of that end.
III.Paris and the Trojan War
Paris of Troy came to Sparta after Aphrodite had promised him the most beautiful woman as a bribe in the Judgment of Paris. Most Greek sources, following Homer, hold that Helen fell in love with Paris and left willingly, though later art and some narratives treat the episode as a forced abduction. At Troy her portrayal is ambivalent: Homer shows her regretful yet shrewd; other accounts make her treacherous or rejoicing in the war's carnage. Stesichorus and Euripides preserve a major variant in which only a phantom Helen went to Troy while the real Helen waited out the war in Egypt.
After Paris's death Helen was remarried to Deiphobus in some traditions; at the fall of Troy she was reunited with Menelaus. Homer's Odyssey places the couple again at Sparta; other legends have Helen ascending to Olympus or meeting a violent end on Rhodes.
IV.Cult and reception
A cult associated with Helen developed in Hellenistic Laconia at Sparta and Therapne, where she shared a shrine with Menelaus; she was also worshipped in Attica and on Rhodes. Pausanias reports that in the second century CE an egg-shell believed to be Leda's famous egg was still shown on the Spartan acropolis.
Helen's beauty inspired artists from the seventh century BCE onward. Christopher Marlowe's lines in Doctor Faustus — "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" — became the classic modern tag for her mythic allure.