Source Verification: Helen
Every claim below is either what a named ancient source attests, in its own line or section, or a point where the sources themselves disagree.
What the Sources Attest
Who are Helen's parents, according to Greek myth?
Zeus came to her mother Leda in the form of a swan, and Helen was said to have hatched from an egg as a result. The same night Leda also lay with her mortal husband Tyndareus, king of Sparta, which is why some ancient accounts give Helen a divine father and her half-sister Clytemnestra a mortal one, born of the same mother on the same night.
Source: Apollodorus, Library 3.10.7
Was Helen taken to Troy against her will?
Homer's Iliad never resolves the question directly. On the walls of Troy, the city's elders murmur that no one should blame the Trojans for fighting over a woman so like a goddess, and old King Priam himself tells Helen she is not to blame in his eyes. Helen's own words are more ambivalent: she calls herself shameless and says she wishes she had died before ever following Paris to Troy.
Source: Homer, Iliad 3.161-180
Does Helen blame herself for the war, in her own words?
Repeatedly, in both Homeric poems. Years later, back home in Sparta, she describes the Achaeans coming to Troy to fight, in her phrase, "for the sake of shameless me," the same self-blame she voices on the walls of Troy during the siege itself.
Source: Homer, Odyssey 4.121-146
Was Helen actually at Troy for the whole war?
Not according to every ancient source. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey both keep her in the city throughout the siege, but Herodotus reports a separate Egyptian tradition in which the real Helen never reached Troy at all, sheltered instead by the Egyptian king Proteus while the Greeks and Trojans fought for ten years over her absence.
Source: Herodotus, Histories 2.112-2.120
Did Helen help any Greek heroes while trapped inside Troy?
According to Apollodorus, yes. When Odysseus slipped into Troy in disguise as a beggar to spy on the city, Helen recognized him, kept his secret, and helped him escape with information and, later, with the theft of the sacred Palladium.
Source: Apollodorus, Epitome 5.13
What happened to Helen after the Trojan War ended?
She returned to Sparta with Menelaus and resumed her life as queen there. Homer's Odyssey shows the couple together years afterward, receiving Telemachus as a guest and reminiscing, with evident affection between them, about the war Helen's own departure had caused.
Source: Homer, Odyssey 4.121-146
Where Accounts Differ
- helen-in-troy-vs-helen-in-egypt
- helen-birth-swan-and-egg
- Herodotus reports a rival tradition in which Helen never reached Troy at all and spent the war in Egypt under the protection of King Proteus; this entry follows Homer's own account, in which she is at Troy throughout, and records the disagreement rather than resolving it.
- A separate, more supernatural strand of the same non-Trojan-Helen tradition, in which a phantom Helen is fought over at Troy while the real Helen waits elsewhere, belongs to Stesichorus and Euripides rather than to Herodotus, whose own account has no phantom in it; this entry follows Herodotus's version specifically.
Sources
- Apollodorus, Library 3.10.7
- Homer, Iliad 3.161-180
- Homer, Odyssey 4.121-146
- Herodotus, Histories 2.112-2.120
- Apollodorus, Epitome 5.13
- Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth (1993)