In Greek mythology, Hellen is the eponymous progenitor of the Hellenes. Usually the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha — though some authors make Zeus his true father — he is father of Dorus, Xuthus, and Aeolus, through whom the major Greek tribal lineages are traced. Homer still knows "Hellenes" as a small Thessalian people; later tradition makes Hellen the name-giver of the Greeks as a whole.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Hellen" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family
The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and most later handbooks make Hellen son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, brother of Amphictyon and Protogeneia. Apollodorus and several scholia add the common alternative that he was Zeus's son by birth and only nominally Deucalion's. Hecataeus preserves a rarer stemma in which Hellen is Deucalion's grandson through Pronous.
By a nymph Orseis (or Othreis / Phthia in other notices) he fathers Dorus, Xuthus, and Aeolus — founders of the Dorians, Ionians (via Xuthus' son Ion), and Aeolians. Hellanicus also names a daughter Xenopatra. Hyginus once lists him among Poseidon's sons, a minority genealogy.
II.Eponym of the Hellenes
Hellen is Thessalian. In the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships the Hellenes are still a small tribe in Phthia under Achilles. Thucydides says that before Hellen the land had no common name "Hellas," only separate tribes (especially "Pelasgian"); as Hellen and his sons grew strong in Phthiotis and allied with other cities, those cities gradually took the name Hellenes.
Thus the figure functions chiefly as a genealogical hinge: the flood-surviving house of Deucalion becomes the ethnic charter of the Greek peoples.
III.In drama
Hellen appears briefly in Euripides' lost Melanippe Wise, where as grandfather of Melanippe he urges Aeolus to destroy the twins Aeolus and Boeotus, mistaken for a cow's unnatural offspring — a scene also painted on a late-fourth-century Apulian volute krater.
Beyond that episode he remains a name-giving ancestor rather than a hero of independent adventure.