Helen

In Greek myth, Leda, the wife of Tyndareus king of Sparta, bore four children, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, Clytemnestra, and Helen, of whom the last at least was fathered by Zeus. According to the usual story, Zeus visited Leda in the form of a swan, Leda laid an egg, and from this Helen was hatched. Helen and her brothers were worshipped as important deities in Sparta, but in the literary tradition, starting with Homer, she is the entirely human wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, the younger brother of Agamemnon, the latter being married to Helen's sister Clytemnestra. Of outstanding beauty, Helen was said to have been carried off in her youth by Theseus to Attica; but during Theseus' absence in the Underworld her brothers rescued her and took her back to Sparta together with Theseus' mother Aethra. She was subsequently wooed by all the leading men in Greece; at the suggestion of Odysseus she was allowed to choose whom she pleased, and the rest swore to abide by her choice and support her husband's rights. She married Menelaus and bore him a daughter Hermione, but while he was absent in Crete Paris arrived in Sparta, and either persuaded Helen to flee with him or carried her off by force to Troy. (The goddess Aphrodite had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife; see PARIS, JUDGEMENT OF.) On his return Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raised an expedition against Troy. Another tradition, apparently as old as the poet Stesichorus (sixth century BC), has it that Helen was carried for safe keeping to King Proteus of Egypt, while Zeus and Hera allowed only a phantom resembling her to accompany Paris to Troy, thus providing a pretext for the Trojan War, which Zeus had already decreed should take place so as to reduce the wickedness and the multitude of men. After the war Menelaus found Helen in Egypt and took her home.

In the Iliad Helen is a tragic figure, compelled by Aphrodite to be the wife of Paris and aware that her wrong-doing has caused suffering for everyone. She reproaches herself, but is not generally reproached by the Trojans and never, as she says, by Priam or Hector. In a memorable scene on the battlements of Troy the old men, seeing her, observe that such beauty puts her beyond blame. In the Odyssey she lives peacefully in Sparta reconciled with her husband, but is an enigmatic figure. Later writers, Greek and Roman, were generally hostile to Helen, and the speeches in her defence composed by Gorgias and Isocrates are little more than rhetorical demonstrations of how to defend the patently guilty.