Helen

Helen was said to be the daughter of Zeus, who came to her mother Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, in the form of a swan; the same night Leda also lay with Tyndareus, and later tradition has Helen hatched from an egg alongside her half-sister Clytemnestra. Grown into the most celebrated beauty in Greece, Helen married Menelaus and became queen of Sparta. When the Trojan prince Paris, awarded her as his prize by the Judgement of Paris, arrived at Sparta and left again with Helen at his side, the Greek kings gathered a fleet under Agamemnon, Menelaus's own brother, and besieged Troy for ten years to win her back. Inside the city, Helen watches the battle from the walls beside old King Priam, who calls her blameless and asks her to name the Greek champions below; she answers that she wishes she had died before ever following Paris, and calls herself shameless for what she has done. After the war she returns to Sparta with Menelaus, and Homer's Odyssey shows the couple living there together years later when Telemachus, Odysseus's son, comes to ask after his father.

Herodotus reports an entirely different, rationalizing version of the story. In his account, storms drove Paris's ship to Egypt, where the local king Proteus learned how Helen had been taken and refused to let Paris keep her, holding her at his own court while Paris sailed on to Troy alone. On this version, the Trojans told the Greeks the truth throughout the ten-year siege, that Helen was not in the city, and were simply not believed; the whole war was fought over a woman who was never there. Herodotus argues for this version from probability, reasoning that the Trojans would have surrendered her rather than lose their city if she had truly been inside it.