As we know, the diverse nature of the poems, dispersed as they were in place, time, poetic type, and social function yet precludes any neat summary of Helen’s role and validates her flexibility as a vehicle for an array of artistic and cultural concerns. She makes her appearances in a broad and varied genre, which are tied closely to the particular place, period, and mode of performances. She also engages with a specific set of historical and cultural circumstances. This paper seeks to discuss how the representation of Helen’s character and her role in the Trojan War have changed over time and the reason for these changes. 

In the Iliad, Homer placed a seductive cause, the quest for beauty, to emphasize Helen’s status of disputable but not destroyable. Beauty was among the greatest of all the archetypes in Homer’s pantheon. It was endowed with the power to undo even the political arrangements of Olympus. As in the Iliad, Hera told Aphrodite to offer her “the Sex and Desire” (Iliad. 14. 196) so that Aphrodite’s charms diverted the will of Zeus and when Zeus saw her, the “lust enveloped him” (Iliad. 14. 296). As possessing this “power,” Helen alone escaped the slavery in store for the others—Briseis, Andromache, and Hecuba. Helen’s transcend economic categories and her identity as a free woman were depicted not only by Homer’s formula for Helen, “the daughter of Zeus,” but also by her overwhelming beauty that wrote its laws. 

Despite her non-infringeable beauty, Helen’s personality was unpredictable. It was not hard to imagine an overbearing, truculent king like Agamemnon, a garrulous old soldier like Nestor, and a vain, young hotspur of the royal house like Paris. However, Helen stood on another ontological phase. This raised the following questions: Was she a goddess or a human? Was she seduced by Paris or raped? Was she a libertine or the victim of society? The answers to those questions varied, corresponding to different interpretations and historical circumstances. Even in Homer’s narratives, these questions stayed unsolved. On the one hand, Priam said: “You are not to blame for this war with the Greeks. The gods are” (Iliad. 3. 172). Athena, on the other hand, called Helen “bitch” directly (Iliad. 3. 442). Thus, Homer did not know what to make Helen, who was as hated as she was privileged.

Altogether with her power of beauty and enigmatic personality, Helen functioned as a sign that interwoven and was suggested through the whole story of the Trojan War. She was not allowed to live in the illusion that the story was hers, which, though, was shaped as she chose. Just like the accessory of Aphrodite, though Helen’s godlike power and ambiguity provided her privilege, she was not able to escape her fate as doomed by gods. “Only she must, consistently and from the beginning, learn to convert or subvert of her daily life into her function as the glyph for shame/shamelessness in the storybook of the tribe.” ^[1] In the Iliad, Chapter 3, Iris lured Helen out to the city walls. Why was Helen needed at the city gates? If Helen was required as a witness to the covenant between the Greeks and Trojans, the plot also required that she be witnessed, because “her function is to be proudly displayed by the Trojans from the tower, and gazed at by the tormented Greeks, as the prize worthy of such a contest.” ^[2] Thus, Helen, so close to godhood, must act as Aphrodite’s sign. Like all signs, Helen must be equivocal in her character. The greater the sign, the more equivocal its meanings: that was in the nature of the sign. However, the standard social contracts did not bound Aphrodite’s favors. Both Trojans and Greeks could not agree on Helen’s significance, even when they held a contest secured by oaths sworn in the presence of the gods, because Aphrodite as a goddess, the archetype of which Helen was the human copy, could not be netted in social signifiers. 

In the Odyssey, the dark side of Helen that destined to be condemned gradually faded away, which, through three respects, augmented the adoration for her divine nature. 

First, the link between Helen and Odysseus created a keen romantic interest. Helen told Telemachus about his father’s secret mission and of the secret meeting between Odysseus and Helen herself deep in the heart of the enemy’s city (Odyssey. 4.240-64). The courtship aspects of Helen’s story, though they remain subliminal in the story itself, were reinforced by the other stories in the Odyssey, where Odysseus in disguise gained access to the private rooms of a goddess or queen. From Troy to Ithaca, Odysseus laid a trail of such trysts with resourceful and charismatic women, which was one of the recurring themes of the poem. By including Helen among these wondrous women, the Odyssey reminded us that though the Trojan War was over, beauty still reigned supreme, and Helen still retained her formidable power to determine the significance of men. 

Second, after the Trojan War, Helen was safely at home in Sparta again. This Helen deviated from her Iliad’s counterpart of conflict and turbulence. She became a symbol of repentance, industriousness, hospitability, and domesticity (Odyssey. 3. 317-19). Her shameful status has been resolved, and she became not a wife and a mistress, but merely a wife. To be noticed, Homer left the interval between the fall of Troy and the domestic scene in Sparta blank. Other sources held that when Menelaus met Helen, he advanced to kill her. However, once under the influence of her charisma, he dropped his sword (Ibycus, frag. 296, PMG). Without disclosing how Helen was domesticated, Homer depicted the husband and wife, with youthful excesses behind them, peacefully enjoying a comfortable middle age with the past conflicts (miseries during the Trojan War) resolved.

Third, the Odyssey implied more explicitly Helen’s divine nature, though it remained nothing more than a suggestion. The Iliad removed the most conspicuous aspects of Helen’s divinity, leaving her only a sign of transcendent power with an ambiance of divinity. An uneasy awareness prevailed in the Iliad that Helen wielded daimonic powers (“[A]ny natural function which has the power to take over the whole person… The daimonic can be either creative or destructive, but it is normally both… The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience — an existential reality”) ^[3]. These powers were made visible and active in the Odyssey: “Helen will lose neither life nor honor; instead, she will be given, according to the syntax peculiar to the Homeric epic, immortality in return for having no honor to lose. That is to be her sign for eternity: to be the woman with no shame. “^[4] Helen was fated to spend eternity in a state of grace or as close to it as human impersonations of the gods can reach. The version of the Odyssey (4. 561-69) held that Menelaus would move to the Islands of the Blest, an indication that he and Helen would unite for all eternity. In this way, even marrying Helen was enough to make Menelaus the son-in-law of Zeus, and this relationship, in turn, was sufficient to guarantee Menelaus’ immortal bliss. Helen’s figure, as depicted in the Trojan War, who was only a victim who lived a swirling life during wartime and suffered from being dishonored, finally reached its conciliation and settlement. 

Nevertheless, in the Odyssey, Helen has risen above the social order to become one of the dreaded goddesses whose influence played a crucial part in determining the plot of the poem. Helen, instead of being portrayed like a sign in the Iliad, had the wisdom to drop into the wine a medicine that alleviated grief and anger and brought blessed amnesia (Odyssey, 4.222-26). Helen, who was portrayed in the Iliad as the cause of the Trojan War, has become the healer, whose analgesic medication would let a man bear the death of his father without grief. We could attribute this shift of perspective to the more considerable latitude that the Odyssey allowed for fantasy and romance from the first two points I mentioned. Also, the gist has been relocated from the “mourning and death” in warfare to ultimate “returning and reunion.” 

After the legend of Homer, the next creative period that was captivated by re-addressing the story of Helen was the era for the Archaic lyric. Archaic lyric, the earliest Greek form of poetry besides the epic genre, embraced works of diverse styles and subjects composed for public and private occasions. Lyric frequently engaged with the Homeric tradition, and symposiasts poetry was much preoccupied with Eros and Beauty. ^[5] Helen, in this way, was tailored for such concerns, and judging from our rather meager surviving fragments, the lyric poets viewed her with different aspects. Different portrayals of Helen were generally due to artistic impressions of female beauty and the extent of the liberation of society. 

One form of lyric poetry was the poetry of blame. “The most substantial surviving specimen of this genre is the crude, colorful poem by Simonides (7th-c. lyric poet from Amorgos) that equates different kinds of women with various animals” ^[6]. Simonides also described the mare woman as a beautiful sight for others, but evil for the man who had her. The poem alluded to Helen explicitly by saying that “Zeus made [women] as the greatest evil, and shackled us with this unbreakable fetter, even since Hades received those who fought on account of a woman” (Poem 7.115-18). On the other hand, several poems originated from Lesbos, in the eastern Aegean, which had a reputation for female beauty, luxury, and uninhibited eroticism ^[7]. Women held high esteem on Lesbos, where Helen was named. The historian Wendy Slatkin wrote:

” Considering the severe restrictions on women’s lives, their inability to move freely in society, conduct business, or acquire any type of non-domestic training, it was not surprising to find that no names of important [female] artists have come down to us from the classical era. Only the poet Sappho received high praise from the Greeks; Plato referred to her as the twelfth Muse. Significantly, she came not from Athens or Sparta but from Lesbos, an island whose culture incorporated high regard for women. ” ^[8]

Stesichorus came from the Greek West, Sicily, who, respecting woman, tried to exonerate Helen from her crimes. He believed that Helen’s shame was not resolved by merely removing Menelaus to the Islands of the Blest with her together, because what happened later cannot offset what happened before. He, thus, proposed the more radical solution to erase Helen from the story altogether and replace her with the goddess who had never lapsed from her pristine purity. ^[9] (Because almost all of Stesichorus’ work has been lost, we can only zoom into his discourse by Plato’s Phaedrus.) Socrates agreed with Stesichorus’ effort: “For these who err in telling stories, there is an ancient purification, of which Homer was not ware, but Stesichorus was: That story is not true; you did not go in the well-benched ships; you did not reach the citadel of Troy” (Phaedrus, 243ab). 

Stesichorus was the first author we know of to do a specific project of defending Helen. He did not argue that she was an innocent victim of abduction, or that her elopement was justified, but denied, in his recantation, that she went to Troy at all. Helen might be blamed by attesting to her traditional actions, for which she was presumed to be both responsible and culpable. Hence Stesichorus defended her by repudiating those actions altogether. By shifting the burden of the Trojan War onto the gods’ shoulders, Stesichorus left Helen’s beauty unsullied by misbehavior. Plato wrote: “It might be so if madness were simply evil, but there is also a madness which is a divine gift” (Phaedrus, 244a). In this way, the gods were not exempt from moral judgment. Moreover, sexually transgressive female divinities have always been a matter of concern. Aphrodite, for instance, “dallies with various lovers, blithely disregarding her marriage to Hephaestus, but that does not stop him from reproaching her as a dog-eyed adulteress and doing his best to control her behavior (Odyssey. 8.306-20).” Thus, although goddesses did have more power and freedom than mortal women, there was still a certain sexual standard on Olympus, and which, as a result, made gods susceptible to criticisms. In this way, Stesichorus’ tale made Helen complicit in policing of her purity and successfully defended her reputation. 

However, the problem was that the evidence was not sufficient due to the absence of the original copy of Setsichorus’s work so that he could not dispute Homer’s narrative to be false. Other resources reported that Helen was living with Achilles after his death (Paus. 3.19.11-13), and Helen did go to Troy with Paris and commanded Homer to compose the epic (Isocrates). These versions, against Setsichorus’ purpose of absolving Helen from her misdeed of causing the Trojan War, underscored Helen’s serial polyandry. In this way, though Stesichorus was consistent in his settings and aiming, we need not take Stesichorus too literally when he declared Homer’s story to be untrue, and not until we obtained enough literary source of Stesichorus could we rely on his artfully constructed Helen. 

Later than the Archaic period came the Athenian tragedy. The Athenian tragedy was not an elite mode of entertainment but a spectacle for the citizenry at large. Audiences were engaged and enthusiastic, and participation in the chorus was an essential civic obligation. In contrast to epic and lyric poetry, which were mediated by a single performer, theoretical characters were physically present on the stage and addressed each other in person. The playwright and director still controlled the story, and also freed privilege, undermined, or withheld particular points of view. ^[9] Nevertheless, the characters have become present to our eyes and ears. Drama thus presented itself as less mediated than other genres, providing the illusion of direct access to ancient figures. As a result, it was widely used to resemble a more famous and representative figure by specific character through the drama, because the familiar historical context was more accessible for audiences to be empathetic.  

The earliest tragedy dealing with Helen was Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which was produced in 458 BCE as the first play in his trilogy, the Oresteia. Helen was a persistent background presence in the Agamemnon, evoked compellingly by the chorus in their songs. However, she did not appear as a character, nor did we have her voice heard. Thus, she was deprived of the opportunity to seduce or mollify those who would blame her. Therefore, this discourse left the field open for her enemies and rendering the audience receptive to their point of view. Clytemnestra, in this way, was a visible embodiment of female evil. At the same time, Helen was a sinister shadow lying behind and inseparably linked with her half-sister.

The chorus equated the feminine Helen with her violent sister. These sisters were not only prone to unbridled sexual desire but highly adept at exercising certain forms of feminine power. Clytemnestra was introduced as “a woman with a man’s heart” (Agamemnon. 11). At the same time, Helen was first mentioned as “a woman bedded by many” (Agamemnon. 62). These pithy descriptions echoed the two different kinds of threats to the Greek gender system: one woman who thought like a man, another who married many men instead of one. Clytemnestra disrupted the order by exercising political power, Helen, by making herself a source of male dispute. 

On the other hand, in this drama, despite the different types of danger embodied by them, the two sisters were ultimately assimilated to each other. Clytemnestra used textiles to entrap Agamemnon, both literally in the bath and figuratively, by luring him to walk on the precious tapestries, and her speech of welcome was a masterpiece of mendacity. She assured her returning husband that she was a good wife, a “watchdog” of his house, “loyal only to him, an enemy to his enemies” (Ag. 606-10) — the converse of her sister. However, since we know full well that she was lying, this self-description served the opposite of its superficial purpose, assimilating her to Helen. When the chorus called her the “convert keeper of the house” (Ag. 154), the phrase could just as well apply to Helen.

Moreover, most fundamentally, both sisters acted independently of men, whom they regarded as replaceable and dispensable, refusing to allow their desires to be subjected to a male constraint. Instead, they turned the tables and controlled their husbands in ways that were tailored to the men’s characters as well as theirs. Menelaus’s inability to control his wife led to Helen’s abduction. The chorus used a whole series of active verses for her departure, including the recurrent three that conveyed the essence of her transgression: “leaving,” “went,” and “sailed away” (Ag. 403, 407, 691). She was unrestricted by the entanglements of fate, as symbolized by constraining fabricates. She was a dream or winged creature that her husband could not hold: “he reaches out to touch, but her figure slips through his desperate arms” (Ag. 422-24). In this way, it was reasonable to place accusations to Helen because she was such an assertive entity to cause all the catastrophe in the Trojan War actively.

In this way, Eduard Fraenkel, a German scholar, brilliantly conveyed the effect of Helen’s presence in Troy in his magisterial commentary: “The individual traits combine to form a figure whose many-colored bewitchingness, gentle and at the same time powerful, lays the hearer under its spell. The air of impersonality, of super-personality, raises Helen above the merely human, removes her from among her kind, and brings her close to an unknown power.” ^[10] This combination of beauty, power, and the bloody slaughter was portrayed in a graphic image offered by the chorus just prior to describing Helen’s arrival at Troy: 

“Once a man reared in his house, a lion cub, torn from the breast while still a suckling whelp. When little, it was so gentle and friendly to children, and always a delight to the old.

……

But as time passed, it showed the true temper of its breed and returned its foster parents’ kindness by slaughtering their herds. A foul forbidden feast that stained the house with the stench of blood (Ag. 717-722, 727-32). “

The following image of Helen as a charming cub that seemed tame at first but grew up and ran amok vividly conveyed the threat to a man’s household by taking in such a creature as a bride.

Aeschylus, indeed, ascribed denunciations solely to Helen. “Oh demented Helen, you wasted all those lives, under the walls of Troy” (Ag. 1455-57). Although Helen’s behavior was just one of many threads in the web of causation that generated the Trojan War, the male participants were free from blame. She was presented not as a disputed object of male strife but as the essence of the conflict itself. By holding her responsible for the entire sequence of events, the chorus treated Helen as the fundamental initiating force of destruction, linking all the activities of the Trojan War and its aftermath into one tidy causal chain.

This threatened violence of the vengeful female was chiefly encapsulated on female independence. As an opposite figure from Athena, the representative Greek god, who was a virgin, Helen embodied Furies (Ag. 749). In that state Helen’s lack of self-control destroyed the minds and lives of men. However, for Helen to be honored, she must learn to control her passions (the Fury. 832-33, 900). This would have made her an instrument, in turn, of Athenian self-restraint (the Fury. 1000). When Helen put aside her anger, she also voluntarily gave up her independence, becoming not only beholden to Athena but also subject to her authority (the Fury. 897, 902). In this course of the trilogy, the exercise of political power shifted from the aristocracy legend, where women played a significant and visible role, to democratic Athens, where women were ex-temptation to sexual misconduct. The vengeful female was redirected into Athenian legal justice administered by men. Thus, the foundation of the court noted that classical Athens, with its democratic institutions, was founded on the suppression of such independence– the threat to Greek cultural ideology of women’s subdued status embodied in Helen. Believing that men’s role as moderating women, Aeschylus used Oresteia as social propaganda to educate Athenian women to be ethical by charging Helen’s wrongness that she exclusively caused the Trojan War.

On the other hand, Euripides, as a more radical democrat, attempted to ameliorate public suppression on women’s status and exonerated Helen from censure. The flaws in several previous defensive revisions were apparent. Kannicht ^[11] considered that Stesichorus did not so much rationalize the Homeric Helen as restoring her to her status as the Spartan goddess. He also argued that Herodotus rationalized and demystified the Stesichorus story by removing the eidolon, thus leaving the Greeks and Trojans to war over something less than an eidolon, “a Nothing.” The previous versions were either contradicted history that engaged revealed that moving Helen from Troy did not settle the issue or compounded her with indeterminacy, which made Euripides modify the defense of Helen. 

Dating from the winter just following the Athenian disaster at Syracuse, when Athenian spirits and fortunes were at their lowest, some have read the Helen as Euripides’ lament over the delusions that send men to war, which we could infer that Euripides, in some way, was calling for peace. War is incidental to this play, in contrast to other plays like The Trojan Women, in which war is the central fact. In Helen, war was something that happened elsewhere and, in another time, a distant thunder that will not severely impact the essential entertainment of reunification. ^[12]

In this revision, Helen herself was a character endowed with credibility. Her story of being seized by Hermes was a heartrending image of a young woman’s fate. The song between Helen and the Chorus (Helen. 164-250) brought to mind the old stories of Helen as a girl at Sparta. She was the innocent bride whom Hermes seized and set down “in this unprosperous land” (Helen. 247), which was more genuinely tragic than she knew. This circumstance was a sort of imprisonment that nullified Helen’s legitimate identity in Troy, Sparta, and even Egypt. Helen was first revoked at Troy, where her shadow was. She was also repealed in Sparta because we cannot think of Helen playing “Helen” at home while her husband was fighting her right name abroad. Finally, she could only be nullified in Egypt, while her reputation still hanged in the balance as she declared: “I am dead in effect, if not in fact” (Helen. 286). What she was not allowed was a present, since her eidolon occupied the exact plot slot. While her imaginary self was alive and well at Troy, it would be unseemly for Helen to create in people’s minds a bewildering oscillation between her and her lustier Trojan twin.

It could be said that a theme in Euripede’s Helen was treated with fundamental seriousness, and something emerged less about the gods than about humans living in the shadow of their signifiers. ^[13] Euripides placed Helen at the center of the debate, as the person most nearly conscious of the plot to separate her body from her name. She knew that she was not her name, sign, icon, and image. She was, however, powerless to make this distinction clear to anyone else, even to her husband, until her shadow disappeared. This theme, as Segal claimed, alienated Helen from herself, in which Euripides was endowed with insight, pathos, and compassion. ^[14]

It then turned out that the original Helen was addressed to be nothing more than a phantom that was removed twice from the original. Euripides, in this way, left Helen to herself while worked assiduously to erase her shame. To eliminate the indeterminacy and the failure of defense for Helen, Euripides designed a plot to write Helen back into the text. Euripides’ success in his depiction was not like his pioneers who only exposed the conspiracy, which required Helen’s complete absence from the story. However, he created the new Helen that was exact replica of the old Helen. The new Helen must be beautiful, graceful, considerate, witty, sad, even tragic, to meet the formatic need of tragedy. This Helen, in contrast with the old one that her completely erased, was credible but still circumscribed by one taboo: She must not, whether by her own will or under any other kind of compulsion, enter the odious foreign bed. ^[15] This action was the most blameful deed done by Helen’s shameful phantom. Euripides, for this reason, wrote: “I will kill you on the tomb’s surface, and then kill myself” (Helen. 842). In this way, to make the taboo credible, Helen herself consented to it. Helen, thus, in Egypt, was a woman whose chastity was initially protected by Proteus and later enforced by her unyieldingness to Theoklymenos. Now, Helen had internalized the taboo, and the Helen we perceived has consecrated herself to virginity and removed from all possible of blame from the center of the Trojan War. 

In summary, these eulogies have been interpreted as audacity adjudicated performances, demonstrating the orator’s skill at making the worse cause to be even more blameful or appear the better. However, a full discussion of methods of rehabilitating Helen deserved separate treatment. The problems that whether she was a victim or libertine, a calamity that caused the misery or herself a tragic figure that was caused by gods’ wills, and whether she was to be blamed or to be exonerated, were all unsolved. Her role in the Trojan War, as a result, varied based on different evidence and interpretations. Helen, on her side, for all poets’ polishing, was as much an idol as she ever was, and remained as a conspicuous daimon mediating between being and significance to be discussed more thoroughly. 

Reference:

1. Austin, Norman, editor. Helen of Troy and her shameless phantom. Myth and Poetics. Ithaca (N. Y.): Cornell University Pr., 1994. Shameless Phantom, 29
2. Shameless phantom, 31
3. Rollo May, Love and Will, ISBN 0-393-01080-5. p. 123–124.
4. Shameless Phantom, 26
5. Blondell, Ruby. Helen of Troy: beauty, myth, devastation. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2013. 5: 96
6. Meredith Brooks, 23
7. Beauty, myth, devestation. 5: 97
8. Slatkin, W. Women Artists in History. Pearson, 2001, 42
9. Bassi, Karen. 1993. Helen and the Discourse of Denial in Stesichorus’ Palinode. Arethusa 26: 53.
10. Fraenkel, Eduard, ed. 1950. Aeschylus: Agamemnon. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
11. Kannicht, R., ed. 1969. Euripides, Helena. 2 vols. Heidelberg: Winter. 1: 47
12. Beauty, myth, devastation. 6: 124
13. Beauty, myth, devastation. 6: 139
14. Shameless Phantom, 188
15. Helena, 1:60

Helen of Troy and Her ShAustin, Norman, editor. Helen of Troy and her shameless phantom. Myth and Poetics. Ithaca (N. Y.): Cornell University Pr., 1994.ameless Phantom

This book investigates the traditional Helen, and the revised Helen by analyzing different literal sources. Homer portraits Helen as it was transmitted through the tradition that culminated in the Homeric poems as a woman who not only disgraced herself but betrayed her family and people. In the post-Homeric literary tradition, Helen is repeatedly reviled, whether as the treacherous wife or as the libertine who preferred pleasure to honor. The author illustrates that Sappho thinks not of Helen worshiped as a goddess at Sparta, but of Homer’s Helen, the shameful woman canonized in the epic tradition,ion thus exonerating Helen on the grounds that, beauty and the desire for beauty are qualities that override all other ethical and social considerations. However, in the archaic period, when lyric poetry was emerging as a personal reflection on traditional myths, a curious counter-movement arose to rescue Helen’s reputation from this disrepute that had accrued to it from the epic tradition. Stesichorus, a significant focus of the author, proposes a radical revision: Helen herself had never sailed to Troy but had been impersonated there by a ghost or eidolon. Thus, at a single stroke, Helen would be removed from Troy, those ambiguities would disappear from her character, and the scandal erased once and for all (The source story for this revision is Plato, in the passage of Phaedrus). 

This contradiction, for me, is fascinating because this revision supplements the incomplete nature of Homer’s narrative. Helen does not adequately express herself in Homer’s composition, leading to abounded variants in Greek myth. However, Stesichorus presented his version of Helen’s myth not merely as a variant but as a thorough repudiation of the Homeric story, because without Helen, the whole story of Homer would fall apart. For this specific case, I still count it as a distortion from Homeric narratives. The motivations expressed in the anecdote of this revision show that honor and shame are the driving forces behind this revisionist plot, as they were of the Homeric plot, though with different focuses. First, Helen in this story is not a woman. However, she has been elevated to unambiguous godhood, with man insulting the goddess, and the goddess taking her immediate and ruthless revenge. A period of alienation then follows between the men and the goddess, but they finally reconcile. Still, versions from the later period are also being analyzed: In Herodotus’ story, Helen is in Egypt, whereas in Euripides’ story, Helen is turned into a sophist. Three of these stories all provide us with different aspects that speculate Helen, which at least reveals the inadequacy and ambiguity of the Homeric portrait of Helen. Moreover, this book enables me to focus more on the theme of eidolon, since the eidolon, whether taken as a revision or as an intriguing interpretation of the traditional myth, is an uncanny expression of the ambivalences continuously at work in the construction of the Helen myth. Also, by tracing a single theme through literature that has lasted several centuries, one risks doing injustice to the individual authors, various references from foreign sources, attitudes, historical backgrounds, and religions that have all contributed to this composition and which deserve a better analysis. 

Blondell, Ruby. Helen of Troy: beauty, myth, devastation. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2013.

The author stands on feminist grounds and focuses on the twin themes of beauty and female agency to argue that Helen of Troy is the mythical incarnation of an ancient Greek obsession: the control of female sexuality and women’s sexual power over men. Moreover, the author believes that the war is caused not only by men’s inability to control the beautiful Helen but by their equal inability to dismiss or destroy her. The author reveals that only in Homer is Helen simultaneously guilty and sympathetic. What more, according to the author’s analysis, in the archaic period, Helen is shown as replaced by a double, created for gods’ purpose. In Athenian tragedy, Helen was used as a significant offstage role being suppressed in the interest of establishing Athenian democracy. In Euripides’ plays, Helen is depicted as a shameless sophist among the Trojan Women and an unattainable fantasy of virtuous female beauty.

I learned that the ancient Greeks had a well-developed discourse of praise and blame that functioned as a means of social control. However, Helen can never be considered as just a scapegoat, since the behavior for which she is to blame is inseparable from her infinitely seductive beauty, and making it impossible to reduce Helen to a mere object of abuse. The Greek warriors’ willingness to pursue an adulterous woman at such an enormous cost risk exacerbating the shame of losing control over her in the first place. Overt abuse of Helen forces them to confront her grip over them, and hence the embarrassing spectacle of their emasculation. The blame on Helen brings the blame on man in its train. Consequently, ancient authors excuse or palliate Helen’s behavior as often as they censure it. Some actively defend her. Insofar as blame is an acknowledgment of power; however, such texts render Helen less potent by the very fact of refusing blame. 

Hughes, Bettany. Helen of Troy: goddess, princess, whore. London: Cape, 2005.

The author follows from Helen’s fortunes as recounted by Homer to scribe in the ancient and medieval worlds, which carefully copied Helen’s story on the papyrus, parchment, and vellum, and to Caxton’s printing press to Westminster in 1476. He focuses on four main topics in his book: Helen’s Facelessness, an Evil Destiny, Helen-Hunting, Goddess, Princess, and Whore. 

Talking about Helen’s facelessness, the author thinks that though the vase painters, sculptors, and fresco artists of Greece and Rome worked for a recognized formula, we have no lifelike representation of Helen from antiquity. Museum storerooms around the world have shelves crammed with vases showing Helen at various points in her life-story and her evolution as an idol, Helen as a girl, Helen as a queen, Helen as a demi-goddess, Helen as a whore. However, these images, without exception, are all made up: they reveal not who Helen was, but whom men have wanted her to be. 

In the section talking about Helen’s identity as an evil destiny, the author believes that Helen is a paradox. A bedazzling, unfaithful queen, a duplicitous homewrecker who caused decades of misery, but she nonetheless survived unscathed: an inscrutable mix of self-will and suggestibility, intellect and instinct, frailty and power. Created at a time before good and evil were regarded as distinct entities, Helen embraces both. 

In the section on Helen-Hunting, the author believes that Helen represents a story of two civilizations, Greeks and Trojans. Also, here are not enough Hittite scholars or research funds, to do the work of publishing information on the excavation, these Hittite texts give an Eastern point of view to the Troy story that has not been fully explored. If Helen is to be understood as a real woman and in the Bronze Age context, then they are vital testimonies. Thus, the author looks not just at what she has come to mean, but what she meant to the people of the past.

In the section on Helen as a Goddess, Princess, and Whore, the author talks about the possible existence of Helen and believes that all three incarnations find their root in the Bronze Age Helen. Within the context of her world, there were prominent and significant aristocratic women who were used as diplomatic trading ships. They were highly valued commodities passed from one state to another. Also, because Mycenaeans and the Hittites imploded into a dramatic rush at the end of the 13th century BC, Helen has come to represent a symbol of war, and her story is proving increasingly appropriate to the circumstances of the Late Bronze Age. The Late Bronze Age burial in Sparta contains a skeleton with sufficient uncontaminated DNA to test as female, lying next to a Greek king. Both corpses wore Trojan gold so that Helen’s existence is undoubtedly interminable. 

I learn that Helen’s story is not adequately discussed due to a lack of sources. Its variety and complexity are all due to historical distortions and needs. Though stories were told all through multiple layers of lens, we could scrutinize and analyze all generations of people. Whenever we clearly understand their cultural demands, the needs and orientation of these distortions should also be precise. The difficulties we face are related to invisible and unrecorded traditions. For instance, oral traditions are not available for us to recover and later analyze. These are the lost treasures for which we should acknowledge our inability to retrieve. The way out is to discern the intentional reliability that approves the subtle distortions or restore certainty, and erase misleading facts. In short, this filtering process is embedded in our comprehensive understanding, and its acceptance approves the rules.

Other bibliography:

Naddaff, Ramona. “No second Troy: imagining Helen in Greek antiquity.” Logos and muthos: philosophical essays in Greek literature. Ed. Wians, William C.. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Albany (N. Y.): State University of New York Pr., 2009. 73-97.

Cyrino, Monica Silveira. “Helen of « Troy ».” Troy: from Homer’s « Iliad » to Hollywood epic. Ed. Winkler, Martin M.. Oxford ; Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 2007. 131-147.

Des Bouvrie, Synnøve. “Helen of Troy : a symbol of Greek culture.” The Norwegian Institute at Athens: the first five lectures. Eds. Andersen, Øivind and Whittaker, Hélène. Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens; 1. Athens: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1991 . 29-40.

Odysseus blames the gods for closing his eyelids in sleep and allowing Eurylochus to give lousy advice of killing the cattle. Because Tiresias and Circe gave Odysseus strict instructions to shun the island of the warmth-giving Sun, he tried to prevent his crew from going to the island. However, Eurylochus thinks they need a rest on the island. Though the crews swear a great oath not to harm the cattle, because they are kept too long on the island and suffer the hunger, they decide to eat the cattle. I think this is not the fault of the gods. If Odysseus can accurately tell the prophecies to his crew, and explain his concerns, the crew can trust Odysseus more and prevent this disaster. Odysseus, though acts like a guard to prevent his crews’ misdeed, cannot persuade his crews by no telling them the truth and eliminate their willingness to eating the cattle.

Metis means “wisdom,” “skill,” or “craft” in Greek, and in ancient Greek religion, it was a mythical Titaness belonging to the second generation of Titans.

By the era of Greek philosophy in the 5th century BC, Metis had become the mother of wisdom and profound thought. However, her name originally connoted “magical cunning” and was as easily equated with the trickster powers of Prometheus as with the “royal metis” of Zeus. The Stoic commentators allegorized Metis as the manifestation of “prudence,” “wisdom,” or “wise counsel,” in which form the Renaissance inherited her.

The Greek word Metis meant a combination of wisdom and cunning qualities. This quality was considered to be highly admirable, and the hero Odysseus was its incarnation. In the Classical era, Metis was regarded by Athenians as one of the notable characteristics of Athenians.

The proem of the Iliad made it clear that Homer’s first poem was about Menis, the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey, however, focused on the heroic quality of Metis. The diversion of attention was consistent with changes in the general perception of heroic characteristics and their varying importance. The heroes of old with their brute strength became less accessible to a regular listenership than those with cunning and persuasive speeches like Odysseus.

Odysseus was amid with situations that could not be overcome by hitherto accepted heroic practices. There were many God or superhuman creatures that impeded Odysseus’ way back home. For example, Calypso kept Odysseus on her island because she fell in love with him. The Cyclops, the grand monster who could tear people apart with bare hands, prisoned Odysseus, and his fellows in the cave as reserve food. The Circe laced potion with insidious drugs that made people forget their native land, struck them, and turned them appear to be pigs. Against supernatural monsters and demi-goddesses, the hero could not employ the brute strength of the traditional Iliadic hero, and must, therefore, rely on his mind. 

Odysseus demonstrated the necessary leadership qualities required in attempting to excel at Metis. An issue that plagued the Ithacan was the protection of Odysseus’ crew, and his Metis was demonstrated not by saving them all, but rescuing as many as he can. It was a skill of leadership to judge necessary sacrifices, and Odysseus repeatedly did just this. When prisoned by Cyclops, Odysseus did not fight against the monster at the beginning when his first man was eaten but waited until the best opportunity to plot his fleet. Also, on the island of Antiphates, when Odysseus escaped with his fellows, Odysseus shrewdly commanded his crew to leave without attempting to rescue more ships. However, If he had done the hitherto considered heroic thing, that was to stay and fight in defense of his fleet, every man would have perished.

This episode also provided grounds for evaluating Odysseus’s powers of persuasive speech, the ability that revealed his Metis at most. Odysseus told his men that he would share what Circe told him, but he “stopped short of mentioning Scylla” (Book XII) so as not to scare them into inaction. This discretion showed forethought; to achieve his goal, Odysseus must keep his men ignorant. Then his speech of encouragement (Book XII) expressed many persuasive elements. Odysseus spoke of the past victory against the Cyclops to make his men more confident. He extolled his virtues, “my courage and wit and strategy rescued us,” to gain their trust in his leadership. Then he appealed to their piety by invoking Zeus, patron god of travelers, to protect them. This speech bolstered the crew.

Another crucial recurring aspect that demonstrated Odysseus’s cunning was his use of disguise. The disguise was the protagonist’s repeated use of concealment as a calculated response to a difficult situation. Examples of this included his deceptions of Nausicaa and Polyphemus (Book VI and Book IX, respectively). This fact might be regarded as a simple and effective ruse, but the implications for a Homeric hero were manifold. Concealing one’s identity was in direct odds to the achievement of Kleos, which was tantamount in all heroes. Glory led to a reputation that led to immortality through renown. To avoid troubles as often as Odysseus chose to show excellent disguise on his part to resist an almost instinctive need to be recognized for heroic deeds by one’s peers. Odysseus’ endurance of himself-imposed inconsequentiality demonstrated his dedication to Metis as an overriding necessity to achieve his goal, which was to return to Ithaca.

However, one thing was essential to note that when Odysseus’s dedication to the intelligent course of action waivered, he brought much trouble upon himself and his crew. Initially, Odysseus was the cause of his strife by insisting he and his men remain in the cave of the Cyclops to enjoy the rights of Xenia to which he was accustomed (Book IX, 104). But Polyphemus did not hold with the Greek customs and ate Odysseus’ crews. Odysseus could be made accountable for those of the team that died at the monster’s hands because they could have escaped before their unwilling host’s return. Moreover, On the island of Circe, Odysseus insisted his fellows to visit the house of Circe. Eurylochus criticized that “it was the reckless Odysseus who led them there. It was his fault they died.” 

Furthermore, Odysseus could not inhibit his tendency to pursuing Kleos as other heroes did. Admittedly, he excelled himself with the intelligent handling of the ruse of the name, which countered his quest for Kleos, the blinding, and the escape from the cave. All this was exemplary proof of his great skill of Metis and persuasive speech. However, Odysseus could not resist his quest for Kleos when he revealed his name, “if anyone among mortal men should ask who put out your eye in this ugly fashion, say that the one who blinded you was Odysseus the city-sacker” (Book IX). This quotation demonstrated the importance that Odysseus placed on his mortal peers, and even strangers he would never meet, of knowing of his achievement. However, this arrogance led to the establishment of the mythical driving force of the adventure plot in the Odyssey. Poseidon, the father of Cyclops, was the leading cause of trouble in Odysseus’ journey because he knew Odyssey was the culprit who ruined his son’s eyes

.

Odysseus must reject the old customs of xenia and Kleos to survive, and he epitomized the struggle to adjust. His powers of Metis were formidable and essential to his survival. However, Odysseus was intermittently undone by his reluctance to reject his old conduct wholly. I can conclude that, while Odysseus demonstrated high power in Metis, his adherence to Xenia and his instinctive obsession with his Kleos ultimately connoted his actions.

Scherer, Margaret R. 1967. “Helen Of Troy”. The Metropolitan Museum Of Art Bulletin, New Series 25 (10): 367-383. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3258426.

Homer’s Iliad told little of Helen’s story. This article focuses on talking about other Medieval plays that described some famous stories of Helen with a view different from Homer. As Christianity gradually superseded paganism and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome entered their long transition to the Middle Ages, the shape of the Trojan story changed, according to social and cultural needs. For instance, Dares, in his book, The History of the Destruction of Troy, showed that the sympathies of Europe were shifting to the Trojan side, and gradually the Trojans rather than the Greeks became the heroes of the tale, with Greek’s images were transformed into medieval knights. In this way, they consider Helen to be innocent. For instance, the Cypria gave an underlying cause, which emphasized the Greek concept of fate, that it was Zeus planning with Themis [goddess of order] to bring about the Trojan War.

Moreover, Medieval romances changed the story of Helen’s abduction radically. To the Middle Ages, people were so emphatical about the Trojan heroes that it was unthinkable for a Trojan to steal his host’s wife from a home where he had entertainments. Thus, when Paris and Helen caught sight of each other, their mutual passion flamed. The medieval romance also found in the welcome of a beautiful queen and opportunity for showing the pageantry of royal entries. Many paintings left showed this tendency. For instance, The Marriage of Paris and Helen. Flemish (Tournai or Brussels), about 1500. Wool and silk tapestry, 11 feet 2 inches x 11 feet 1 inch. Homer depicted in Odysseus that Helen lived with Menelaus in harmony and comfort. Euripides also wrote in drama Helen thatMenelaus found the real Helen in Egypt. Then the phantom of Helen in Troy vanished. The medieval romances, on the other hand, told that the Greeks felt considerable enmity against Helen after the fall of Troy. Pausanius, a second century A.D. author, told several versions of Helen’s end: Her grave was on the island of Therapne with Menelaus’; the jealous queen hanged Helen on the island of Rhodes after Menelaus’ death, and Helen lived in the White Isle with Achilles. 

In short, the story of Helen and the attitude people treated with Helen were not precisely accessible for us nowadays. They varied according to different cultural propagandas. That is the reason that so many versions of her stories left and song by us. 

Blondell, Ruby. 2018. “Helen And The Divine Defense: Homer, Gorgias, Euripides”. Classical Philology 113 (2): 113-133. doi:10.1086/696821.

In this article, the author wants to look at the difference both these contexts make, individually and together, to his interpretation of the argument that he calls the divine defense: the claims that one is not responsible for one’s actions if a god caused them. He shall focus on the three principle occasions when this argument is used to exonerate Helen of Troy.

The tension is the gods, of course, heavily involved in Helen’s elopement. Zeus begets her specifically to make men fight over her beauty, and, at the Judgment of Paris, Aphrodite offers “marriage to Helen” as a bribe. However, these sources agree that she leaves her husband willingly, driven by her desire. In such cases, divine influence on human behavior does not typically remove human responsibility. The three contexts are significantly different, in which the divine defense of Helen, as used in these three texts, is uttered in different ways – both internal and external – is fundamental to its precise import in each case.

For Homer, it is in Priam’s voice that we hear the divine defense used on Helen’s behalf. He is addressing Helen herself, in a private conversation, as they look down from the walls of Troy at the duel between Paris and Menelaus. He says that “In my view, you are not responsible, but the gods are responsible, who stir up lamentable war with the Achaians.” In this case, the tension between self-blame and exculpation of Helen makes it easier to use the divine defense, as Priam does, as a face-saver on behalf of another person rather than oneself.

For Gorgias, the defense speech is argued by the sophist that Helen should not be held responsible for eloping if she “did what she did” under the influence of the gods. Gorgias develops his argument in a way that challenges the foundations of the moral order by threatening to eliminate human responsibility as such and with it all moral judgment, praise, and blame. In other words, he defies traditional views about human responsibility grounded in the principle of double determination. Though the perspective and critical point are similar to Homer’s setting, this internal context of utterance for Gorgias’ use of the divine defense is a public gathering where a man is speaking on behalf of an absent woman, a passive and powerless object or vehicle, to an assembly of other men. However, though Gorgias claimed that his goal was to arouse pity for Helen, this detached stance distances us from her point of view, and thus from sympathizing with her.

For Euripides, he gives Helen an unparalleled opportunity to defend herself at length for her elopement. This argument is structurally similar to those we see in Homer and Gorgias, Helen’s denial of double determination, placing it in Helen’s own, constitutes a shameless refusal of personal responsibility. Talking about herself makes herself hateful for Trojan women, and departs appropriately feminine comportment. Thus, Helen’s death sentence stands.

Skutsch, Otto. 1987. “Helen, Her Name And Nature”. The Journal Of Hellenic Studies 107: 188-193. doi:10.2307/630087.

      The author claims that to put forward ideas on the name and nature of Helen may seem hazardous because of the uncertainty of the evidence. Nevertheless, the author shall attempt to outline the problems. If the author proposes any solution, the solution should be tentative.

     In the treatment of myth, two tendencies were strong: with comparative philosophy coming it is own, it became fashionable to equate Greek mythological names with those of India. The other one was to reduce all mythological figures to natural phenomena.

     Helen was, in fact, a tree goddess or, more generally, a goddess of vegetation. Another theory said that Helen went away to the south like the sun when the winter came. Moreover, Helen, with her brother, were divine twins known to many of the Indo-European tribes. In Germanic mythology, their stories were all related to the sun.

     There might be two mythological Helen. Because there were different sources, it showed that there existed “Helen,” the name without digamma (Corinth), and with digamma (which means the swift one). Though it may be tempting to ascribe the spelling to the influence of Homer, little influence of Homer appeared in the form of the other name on Corinth. We shall see below a difference in the functions of different “Helen,” which strongly suggests that we have to do with two different names.

     Regarding the one with initial “s,” if made into a name, it would mean “the shining one.” That name fitted the vegetation goddess who receded to the south like the sun extremely well. Firstly, the Spartan goddess and Helen of Troy were identical, that the vegetation goddess was liked with Menelaus in their cult at Therapne. Secondly, as the shining one, her name connected with lights other than the sun, especially torch and the corposant, as depicted in many other plays than Homer’s.

     In short, the author tries to combine Helen without a digamma with Helen with a digamma. However, the others think there are no exact parallels for the relative, but there are dedications with the demonstrative pronoun. The author still holds that it is likely that, among a group of items dedicated, so small an object as a ring would bear the dedicatory inscription.

Hughes, Bettany. 2005. Helen Of Troy. London: Jonathan Cape.

Blondell, Ruby. 2013. Helen Of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Austin, Norman. 1994. Helen Of Troy And Her Shameless Phantom. Itahca And London: Cornell University Press

I think the author is persuasive. In the story of Kleomedes, when society mistreated him, he murdered the children for revenge. This action unmasked its toxic core and might even hint at the damaging nature of Kleos. Kleomedes’ misdeed was the destruction of his community and a symbolic attempt to outlive it. As the author said: “The ‘hero’ is opposed to the community structurally (he fights them) and symbolically (he kills the future).” For example, Ajax was one of the representative toxic heroism that we learned. When Agamemnon decided to give the prize to Odysseus rather than him, Ajax got mad and wanted revenge. He then killed the cattle that were disguised by Athena to be his enemies. His constrained senses of self that he only wanted to seek Kleos, and lost opportunities for belonging because he killed the cattle, were all critical aspects of why the heroic pattern was insufficient for the complicated lives we live and why these heroes, like Kelomedes, turned to violence against their own people. Besides, this toxic heroism does have an impact on nowadays lives. Because the heroic pattern is reflective of latent and immanent social relationships and structures, it enforces damaging stereotypes. While women have little space to act as independent agents in its plot and heteronormative male sexuality is almost always a dominant structuring force. This tradition significantly perpetuates oppressive structures for women. In this way, this toxic heroism manifests itself in the modern world in the form of sexual discrimination and still calls for affirmative actions.

Helen, often called “Helen of Troy,” was a daughter of Zeus and Leda, and the sister of Polydeuces and Caster (also known as Dioscuri)^[1]. She was the most beautiful woman in the ancient Greek world and was the indirect cause of the ten years Trojan War. 

Leda was the daughter of Thestius and the wife of Tyndareus. One night she was embraced both by her husband and by Zeus in the form of a swan, and by the former, she became the mother of Caser and Clytemnestra, and by the latter of Polydeuces and Helen. However, according to Homer’s description, only Helen was the daughter of Zeus. She produced two eggs. After Leda’s death, she raised to the rank of divinity, under the name of Nemesis ^[2].  

Helen was born among one of the eggs, in Sparta. She was wornshipped as a goddess associated with trees that could make ugly child beautiful. The legendary beauty of Helen attracted men from afar and also those close to home who saw her as a means to the Spartan throne. Theseus, the hero of Athens, kidnapped Helen when she was still young. In conjunction with Pirithous, Theseus carried Helen to Attica. After Theseus was absent in Hades, Polydeuces and Castor undertook an expedition to Attica. They took Helen back to Sparta with the mother of Theseus, Aethra, as a slave of Helen ^[3].After her return to Sparta, consulted with Odysseus, Tyndareus gave Helen to Menelaus, brother of the Mycenaean King Agamemnon. Agamemnon and Menelaus were sons of King Atreus of Mycenae and were therefore referred to as Atrides. Agamemnon married the sister of Helen ^[4]. 

Laurie Macguire ^[5], writing in “Helen of Troy From Homer to Hollywood,” listed the following 11 men as husbands of Helen in ancient literature, proceeding from the official list in chronological order:

1. Theseus
2. Menelaus
3. Paris
4. Deiphobus
5. Helenus (“ousted by Deiphobus”)
6. Achilles (Afterlife)
7. Enarsphorus (Plutarch)
8. Idas (Plutarch)
9. Lynceus (Plutarch)
10. Corythus (Parthenius)
11. Theoclymenus (attempt, thwarted, in Euripides)

Before Menelaus married Helen, Helen’s earthly father Tyndareus extracted an oath from these, the Achaean leaders, that should anyone try to kidnap Helen again, they would all bring their troops to win back Helen for her rightful husband. When Paris took Helen to Troy, Agamemnon gathered together these Achaean leaders and made them honor their promise. That was the beginning of the Trojan War.

The most famous mate of Helen was Paris of Troy, but he was not the last one. After Paris was killed, his brother Deiphobus married Helen. Paris, as known as Alexander or Alexandros, was the son of King Priam of Troy. He grew up as a shepherd on Mount Ida. During his shepherd life, three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, appeared and asked him to award the “fairest” of them the golden apple. Paris awarded the apple to Aphrodite and she had offered Paris the most beautiful woman on earth for his bride. When Paris came to the court of Menelaus as a guest, he aroused an unaccustomed desire in Helen, and Helen took some responsibility for her abduction. Menelaus received and extended hospitality to Paris. Then, when Menelaus discovered that Paris had taken off for Troy with Helen and other prized possessions Helen may have considered part of her dowry, he was enraged at this violation of the laws of hospitality. Paris offered to return the stolen possessions, even though he was unwilling to return Helen, but Menelaus wanted Helen, too. However, Helen was portrayed on many Greek vases. The moment where Menelaus was reunited with his wife after the fall of Troy was depicted on an Attic oinochoe (ca. 430 BCE; Vatican Museum) and on the skyphos of Hieron and Macron (ca. 490 BCE; Boston). Menelaus rode towards her with drawn sword (or casting away his sword) while Helen fleet. The same scene was painted in fresco in the Casa del Menandro (Pompeii). ^[6]

One version about the end of Helen was she lived a happy life with Menelaus after they went back to Sparta. According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodos, where she was hanged by the Rhodian queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan War. The poet Stesichorus, however, related in his second version of her story that she and Paris were driven ashore on the coast of Egypt and that Helen was detained there by King Proteus. The Helen carried on to Troy was thus a phantom, and the real one was recovered by her husband from Egypt after the war. This version of the story was used by Euripides in his play Helen ^[7].

Word: 777

Bibliography:

[1]: Pseudo-Apollodorus. The Library iii, 10.7; Hyginus. Fabulae, 77; Scholiast on Callimachus’ Hymn to Diana, 232.

[2]: N.S. Gill, Biography of Helen of Troy, Cause of the Trojan War, May 15,2019

[3]: Hyginus. Fabulae, 79; comp. Pausanias. Description of Greece i, 17.6, 41.5; ii, 22.7.

[4]: N.S. Gill, Biography of Helen of Troy, Cause of the Trojan War, May 15,2019

[5]: Macguire, Laurie. “Helen of Troy from Homer to Hollywood.” Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

[6]: Encyclopedia Britannica, inc. Helen of Troy, Apirl 18, 2019.