Greek mythology – Helen of Troy history

Exploring the Various Accounts of Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy, or Helena, is a mythological figure of Ancient Greece. The wife of Menelaus, Helen is usually said to be the daughter of Zeus and Leda. However, there are different versions of the tale in which she is the daughter either Oceanus and Tethys, or of Zeus and Nemesis. She was the cause of the Trojan War, indirectly, in part due to her being the most beautiful and desirous woman in all of Greece.

Helen was captured as a child by Theseus, taken from Sparta and carried to Attica; however, she was later rescued by her brothers and brought back to Sparta. The most famous of Greek princes sought her hand in marriage when she was of age, but her father decided she would be wed to Menelaus. The goddess Aphrodite devised a plot while Menelaus was away, helping Paris, the son of Priam, to seduce Helen and induce her to flee to Troy with him. After Paris died, Helen then married Deiphobus, his brother – but it is said she betrayed him, by delivering him in to the hands of Menelaus when Troy was captured. Having forgiven her, Menelaus and Helen returned to Sparta together to live out their days in happiness, and they were both buried at Therapnae in Laconia upon their deaths.

There is a different account in which Helen lived on after Menelaus’ death, but she was then driven away by her stepsons. In this account, she flees to Rhodes where she meets her death at the hands of her former friend Polyxo who, in an act of revenge for the death of her husband Tlepolemus in the Trojan War, hangs Helen from a tree. Helen is said to have been married in the afterlife to Achilles on the island of Leuke, his home.

In yet another version, during Helen and Paris’ voyage to Troy, their ship was driven off course and landed on the coast of Egypt where, upon learning the truth of their situation, King Proteus sent a phantom Helen on to Troy while the true Helen was detained in Egypt. Menelaus later found his wife when his ship was also driven by the winds to the shores of Egypt, and he then took her home to Sparta. A festival was held in honor of Helen at Therapnae in Laconia, where she was worshiped as the goddess of beauty. To make amends for the crime of Polyxo, the inhabitants of Rhodes built a temple in her honor and worshiped Helen under the name of Dendritis – the tree goddess. There appears to be a reference to the worship associated with her name in the Rhodian story. Helen was the subject of an epic written by Colluthus and a tragedy by Euripides. Perhaps originally a goddess of light or a moon-goddess, Helen was eventually transformed in to the radiant heroine at the center of the epic Greek poem, the Iliad. Helen was a patron deity of sailors, as were her brothers.