Helen, the most romantic figure of antiquity, famous for her beauty and the misfortunes that followed in her train. She was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, and owed her more than mortal loveliness to her divine origin. At the age of ten she was carried off by Theseus and Pirithous, but was soon recovered by her brothers Castor and Pollux, of whom the latter was half an immortal like herself. She was sought in marriage by all the noblest Greek princes, whom her father bound by an oath to respect the choice which Helen herself should make. She chose Menelaus, and bore to him the fair Hermione. When she was carried off by Paris, son of Priam of Troy, through the connivance of Aphrodite, Menelaus mustered all the Greek princes to revenge the wrong, and thus the famous ten years' Trojan war began. After the death of Paris, not long before the fall of the city, Helen was married to his brother Deiphobus, and she is said to have betrayed him to Menelaus and so regained her husband's love. With him she returned to Sparta, and there lived the rest of her life in quiet happiness. The pair were at last buried together at Therapnæ in Laconia, although, according to the prophecy of Proteus in the Odyssey, they were not to die, but to be translated to Elysium. Another story makes Helen survive Menelaus, and be driven out of the Peloponnesus by his sons. She fled to Rhodes, and was there tied to a tree and strangled by Polyxo—a crime expiated only by the Rhodians building a temple to her, under the name of Helena Dendritis. Yet another tradition makes her marry Achilles on the island of Leuce, and bear him a son, Euphorion.
In the Homeric poems Helen survives as the personification of all grace and loveliness. She is the daughter of Zeus, although there is no mention as yet of the swan story of her mother's wooing by the god. Into the conception of her character in the Iliad there enters but little sense of moral responsibility, perhaps because she is a personage that has come into history from the world of mythology, which is ever innocent of morals. In the Odyssey, again, we find an incipient sense of moral responsibility, the burden of which is, however, shifted from the shoulders of Helen on to those of some god (Od. xxiii. 222). It is true, however, that Iliad ii. 356 and 590 may fairly be interpreted to convey the meaning that Helen was carried away by force, an unwilling victim of Aphrodite. Still the fact remains that there exists a notable difference of tone about this question, and this is not unfairly advanced as one of their strongest arguments by those who claim a later date for the Odyssey than the Iliad. Others, again, contend that in the Iliad there is a no less distinct sense of moral responsibility, pointing out that in iii. 164 and vi. 357 there is blame distinctly imputed to the gods, and that in iii. 173–176 and vi. 344 Helen takes the burden of the guilt upon herself. Among her warmest apologists are Mr Gladstone and Mr Andrew Lang. Indeed the former makes bold to say that 'her self-abasing and self-renouncing humility come nearer, perhaps, than any other heathen example to the type of Christian penitence.'
Pausanias tells us that on the chest of Cypselus, a work of the 7th century B.C., Menelaus was represented as rushing on to kill Helen; and, according to a statement attributed to Stesichorus, the Achæan host were about to kill her when their hands were stayed by the power of her beauty. In his Troades Euripides makes Helen plead her cause to Menelaus with sophisticated rhetoric; in the Helena he makes her remain in Egypt, the Greeks and Trojans fighting merely for a shadow formed by the gods out of cloud and wind. Again, in his Cyclops the giant speaks of Helen in a manner far removed from the high chivalry and tenderness of Priam and of Hector. In the Aeneid we are invited to behold the hero about to slay Helen crouching in terror in the temple of Vesta, and only saved from this infamy by the inter- position of Venus. 'Hundreds of years later,' says Mr Lang, 'Helen found a worthier poet in Quintus Smyrnæus, who in a later age sang the swan-song of Greek epic minstrelsy.' As the personification of all feminine loveliness, she was conjured up to play a part in the dream of Faust, whose words of wonder at the vision of her beauty in Marlowe's tragedy are almost worthy of their theme:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium! . . .
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
The loves of Faustus and Helen in the second part of Goethe's Faust typify the union of the classical and romantic spirit. She is its spiritual heroine throughout, and by his union with her in the fourth act Faust is raised infinitely rather than degraded in character. Last among the greater poets who have felt across the centuries the spell of Helen's loveliness are Walter Savage Landor and Tennyson; the former in some of the finest lines in his Hellenics commemorates the power of her beauty to disarm the anger of Menelaus; the latter has painted for us this 'daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair,' in his splendid poem, A Dream of Fair Women. Poets and poetasters since have touched the theme, but deserve not even to be named together with these.
Helen will remain to posterity what she is in the Iliad, one of the most splendid creations in the whole world of art—a queen of beauty supreme over the human imagination, as she was when she went at the summons of Iris, all draped in silvery white, with her three maidens, to the walls of Troy. There above the gate sat the venerable King Priam among his counsellors, and all marvelled greatly at her beauty. 'No marvel is it that Trojans and Achæans suffer long and weary toils for such a woman, so wondrous like to the immortal goddesses' (Iliad, iii. 156-158).
See the delightful essay appended to Andrew Lang's fine poem, Helen of Troy (1882).