As legendary beauties go, few are as legendary or as beautiful as the mythic Helen of Troy,
who became the cause of the Trojan War. But who is this Helen? Was she really worth losing
a city over? Turns out there's probably a lot of weird stuff you don't know about Helen
of Troy.
If you didn't know anything about Helen of Troy, you could probably assume two things
from her name: she was called Helen, and she was from Troy. Well, only one of those things
is true. It would actually be more accurate to call her Helen of Sparta, because she was
born, raised, and married there. And to be fair, some people do call her that.
"Helen? Helen of Sparta?"
As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains, she didn't go to Troy until the Trojan prince
Paris took her there as his prize for picking Aphrodite as the winner in a beauty contest.
In fact, her presumed father was the king of Sparta, Tyndareus, and her first husband
was also the king of Sparta. Legend says Tyndareus once forgot to make a sacrifice to Aphrodite,
and as a result, she cursed his daughters so they would be doomed to leave their husbands
and marry multiple times. That fate applied to his step-daughter Helen as well as his
biological daughters Timandra and Clytemnestra. The latter not only left her husband but in
fact stabbed him to death in the bathtub. Harsh.
Tyndareus was only Helen's "presumed" father because, as was true of so many notable people
in Greek myth, her father was actually Zeus. Although Tyndareus raised Helen as his own,
he probably suspected something was up because Helen hatched from a giant egg, which is pretty
rare for human births.
In the most common version of the Helen story, her mother was Leda. If you've seen any art
showing a woman getting very cozy with a swan, that's Leda. According to the Encyclopedia
Britannica, Leda was a princess of Aetolia who married Tyndareus. One day a swan flew
into her arms to escape a pursuing eagle. This swan turned out to be Zeus in disguise,
and he used all his avian charms to seduce Leda and before she knew it, she was laying
two enormous eggs full of babies. Egg-celent!
While the Athenian hero Theseus is best known for traversing the Labyrinth and slaying the
Minotaur, the dude had a long life filled with adventures. Some of the wildest of these
come as a result of his friendship with Pirithous, which could best be described
as an escalating series of dares.
According to the mythographer Pseudo-Apollodorus, after killing a bunch of centaurs that got
way too drunk at a wedding, Theseus and Pirithous decided it would be cool if they both married
daughters of Zeus. Theseus decided to marry Helen, and Pirithous swore to marry Persephone,
the literal queen of Hell. Both of these goals involved kidnappings,
and both were monstrously bad ideas.
Theseus took the child Helen from Sparta and left her in the care of his mother, while
he and Pirithous went down to the Underworld for Persephone. Long story short, the two
idiot boy kings got trapped in the Underworld for a while in a magical chair. Meanwhile,
the semi-gods Castor and Pollux led an invading force against Athens, not only reclaiming
their sister Helen, but also taking Theseus' mother back to Sparta with them as a slave
for good measure.
When Helen was actually old enough to get married, Tyndareus found himself with a pretty
serious problem: how do you choose a husband for the most beautiful woman in the world?
According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Tyndareus was rightly worried showing preference to
one of any one king over the others could lead to literal violence with armies and all.
The good news for Tyndareus, though, was one of the suitors present was Odysseus, the smartest
guy in Greece, who knew he didn't stand a chance in this contest and was actually more
interested in marrying Penelope.
Odysseus suggested a compromise that came to be known as the Oath of Tyndareus: once
Helen's dad made his pick, every king present would swear a blood oath to throw his military
might into avenging the chosen one if anything should happen to him. This agreement made
Tyndareus choose Menelaus as his son-in-law and heir.
"Yeah whatever I'll have that one."
"Menelaus of Sparta is chosen."
"Sweet as a nut mate!"
It was this oath that led to one thousand ships being launched to get Helen back once
Paris made off with her.
So even if Helen of Troy wasn't from Troy, she definitely at least went there, right?
Like, that was the whole point of a 10-year war in which many of the leading lights of
Greece and Troy became a feast for crows. Well, uh, maybe not. According to a number
of authors, the Helen who went to Troy was actually a hologram made of clouds, while
the real Helen was taken to Egypt by Hermes, where she lived out the entirety of the war.
In Euripides' play Helen, the Spartan queen receives word her husband Menelaus has drowned
while returning from Troy, leaving her open to the advances of the king of Egypt. At that
point, however, a stranger washes up on shore who, as luck would have it, turns out to be
Menelaus. The two reunite and explain to each other the various hologram-related shenanigans
that got them to this point. Then they come up with a plan to trick the king of Egypt
and escape back to Sparta.
This version of events sounds buck wild, but the historian Herodotus claimed he interviewed
Egyptian priests who could confirm Helen was definitely there, so who can say, really?
If you can't trust Herodotus, who can you trust?
One thing the various authors of myths couldn't seem to agree on is where Helen's loyalties
lay. If she was, in fact, kidnapped against her will by Paris, it seems clear she would
be hoping the invading Greeks would win the war, so she could return to Menelaus and their
daughter. If, instead, she was in love with Paris, it seems reasonable she would want
to stay in high-walled Ilium with her new beau. Each version has its own supporters.
In the Greek epic the Odyssey, Homer tells how Helen tried to expose the trick of the
Trojan Horse by circling it and doing impersonations of each of the Greek kings' wives in order
to fool them into replying and exposing themselves. It almost worked, but the clever Odysseus
figured out what she was doing and made sure everyone inside the horse kept their mouths
shut.
The Roman author Virgil, however, says Helen remained true to the Greeks. In book six of
his epic the Aeneid, the ghost of Deiphobus, a prince of Troy and Helen's third husband
after his brother Paris was killed, tells how Helen went out into the city pretending
to perform a religious rite just so she could signal to the Greeks inside the Horse. For
whatever reason, neither author wanted to claim Helen for their side.
Pretend you're Menalaus. Your wife just ran off with a young, hot guy, you ended up in
a big war, and all-in-all you're pretty steamed about the whole thing. According to various
sources, Menelaus raised a sword to his unfaithful wife when storming the conquered Troy.
"I want her back."
"Well of course you do. She's a beautiful woman."
"I want her back so I can kill her with my own two hands."
"DAAAAMN!"
At the last minute, though, he decided to be merciful and spared her life. While the
tale varies, in arguably the most mainstream version of the story, Helen and Menelaus reconcile
and return to Sparta. They live together and die together and are buried together, happily.
The geographer Pausanias, however, records a completely different version of events told
by the inhabitants of the island of Rhodes. According to him, Helen was driven out of
Sparta by Menelaus' sons and made her way to the home of a friend on Rhodes. What Helen
didn't know is this "friend" blamed her for the death of her husband, who died on the
first day of the Trojan War. The Rhodian queen waited until Helen was bathing and then sent
out a bunch of her handmaidens dressed up as the Greek revenge-demons the Furies. These
maids, apparently wearing fake bat wings, dog masks, and snake wigs, grabbed Helen from
the water and strung her up from a tree.
Okay, let's back this up a little and look at the facts. Or, at least, what the legends
tell us the facts are. Helen was a demigod daughter of Zeus married to a legendary king.
She also most likely originated as a goddess who got "demoted" to demigod status as her
story got refined over the years. So it's not particularly surprising that Helen of
Troy was worshiped in various spots around Greece.
One of the major shrines to Helen was shared with her husband, Menelaus. According to the
University of Warwick, the Menelaion was located just east of Sparta. Though it came to be
regarded as the burial place for the legendary couple, some suggest the shrine was originally
dedicated to Helen alone, where she was worshiped as a fertility goddess, only for the Menelaus-related
elements to be added later.
Pausanias tells how the Rhodians worshiped Helen as a fertility goddess known as Helena
Dendritis, or Helen of the Trees, with her shrine naturally being the tree where she
was hanged. He further says in a temple on the acropolis of Sparta
hang bits of eggshell tied with ribbon, which people believed to be part of the egg from
which Helen and her egg-siblings were hatched.
If you've ever engaged in any type of creative endeavor, you've probably felt pressure to
recreate the perfect image in your head, to do justice to the spirit of the person, place,
or theme that inspired you. Imagine, then, the immense pressure to paint a portrait of
the most beautiful woman who ever lived. That was the task facing the legendary Greek painter
Zeuxis when he was commissioned to envision Helen of Troy in paint to decorate a temple
of Hera.
According to the College Art Association's review of a book about him, Zeuxis' reaction
to his assignment was to say perfection isn't found in nature, so he would find no single
suitable model for Helen of Troy. Instead, he recruited five different maidens, whose
best features he combined into a single figure like some kind of erotic Voltron.
The scene of Zeuxis picking his models became a popular artistic motif itself in modern
times.
In 1604, English playwright Christopher Marlowe penned a line about Helen of Troy more famous
than anything Homer ever conceived of. Doctor Faustus sees a demon assuming the form of
the legendary beauty and says, quote, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?"
The line has its basis in Lucian of Samosata's satirical Dialogues of the Dead, but it's
one of those things that's so entrenched in culture few people know its origin apart from
it being a thing you say about Helen of Troy.
"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
The line also became the basis of one of the most famous jokes drawn from that common well
of comedy: the metric system.
"You're a smart motherf---er. That's right, the metric system."
As the Back of the Cereal Box blog recounts, the idea of a metric unit of beauty based
on Helen of Troy is often attributed to Isaac Asimov, apparently in one of his more whimsical
moods, though mathematician W. A. H. Rushton sometimes gets the credit. The idea is if
a Helen is the amount of beauty necessary to launch 1,000 ships, then this is a unit
that could be broken down in a decimal fashion, and thus a milliHelen would be the amount
of beauty necessary to launch one ship. Now you have an empirical way to tell your girlfriend
she's as pretty as a whole half a Helen. Okay, on second thought, maybe don't do that.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite
myths are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss
a single one.