Helen of Sparta

Helen of Sparta was the most beautiful of all women. The cause of the Trojan War. 

We first meet her in the Iliad. She's in her room embroidering when Iris, the female herald of the gods disguised as one of Priam's daughters, is sent by the gods to inform her that she should go out on the walls to watch a fight between her husband and her lover (Paris and Menelaus). Helen is immediately shocked. She sheds tears as she remembers her native town, her family, and her husband.

Carefully dressed (with a white mantle over her head), she runs out of her apartment accompanied by her two handmaids. On her way to the wall, she meets Priamos and the other old men of Troy, ex-warriors and generals who have retired and left war because of their mature age and keep talking all day like cicadas.

Ancient greek loom

When they see her, they start wondering whether a war for her can be justified, and then Priamus welcomes her. Come on, my child, he says. You are not to be blamed. It's God's will. The war was caused by Zeus. Gods have caused the Trojan War. Helen feels guilty. "I deeply respect you, my father-in-law" she said. "I'd better have been dead than get into an affair with your son, leaving behind relatives, friends, and my only child."

Helen seems really regretful for her deeds, saying that all those years in Troy she hasn't stopped crying.

When Troy falls, Helen becomes a slave like the other women of Troy, being a mistress of Paris and unfaithful to Menelaus. Menelaus is the happiest of all men because, after ten years, he was given Helen back to kill her on Troy, take her back home, and kill her there.

Hecavi, Priam's wife, tries to persuade him to kill Helen immediately. She is afraid that if he ends up killing Helen, she might finally persuade him not to do so, due to her beauty and her ability to change men's minds. Helen asks Menelaus about her future. She asks for mercy and says that her death won't be fair. She puts the blame on Paris and Priam because he didn't kill Paris while he was a baby. So he grew old, and Cypris promised him to give Helen to Paris as a present if he awarded Aphrodite the prize of beauty.

Helen in angiography

So the Greeks had a great profit; they defeated the barbarians. But their victory ruined Helen, and they all kept accusing her. She was trapped by her own beauty. And how did she escape? How did she leave her home? With the help of Aphrodite, of course. Can you oppose a goddess? While being in Troy, she was trying to escape, to leave Paris and come to Menelaus ships, but she was guarded, and Trojan soldiers kept her imprisoned. So why should she die?

No one can say no to God. Menelaus seems determined to kill her. Helen asks to be forgiven. Helen is unhappy; she's a victim of the gods. Their plots and competitions have driven her to a miserable life. Away from her family, away from her daughter, imprisoned, unhappy, and finally obliged to beg for her life as a slave, But Euripides shows one more aspect of Helen. Helen was not in Troy. She was in Egypt!

Leda and the swan

In his tragedy "Helen," Helen is complaining about her fate. She lives in the palace of an Egyptian king, whose son wants to marry her. She was born to be in trouble since there is a story telling that her real father was not Tyndareos but Zeus himself. Having transformed himself into a swan, he "met" Lyda, and Lyda gave birth to an egg. And Helen came out of this egg. She then repeats the story with Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, and Paris and says that she had no intention to leave her husband. He is the only man she has ever loved, and she misses him very much.

And there is strong evidence of all these. She has never been to Troy. She was in Egypt. In Troy, there was only her shade. The fact that Helen is Zeus' daughter is well known. This might be an explanation of her divine beauty. But Helen is still unhappy because she has never been to Troy, the Greeks keep blaming her, she is away from her country, she is in a foreign land, Egypt, and a new person wants to marry her against her will.

At the end of this tragedy, Helen will meet with Menelaus again, and they will sail away for Sparta. Telemahos, in the epic poem of the Odyssey, will meet Helen at her palace in Sparta, where she lives with her husband, of course, Menelaus. A happy end for Helen in all cases. She went back home after all.

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