Helen

Helen first appears in Iliad III, when Iris brings her to the Scaean Gate to watch the duel between Menelaus and Paris. The old men of Troy see her and say that no one could blame the Trojans for fighting so long for such a woman—and then add that it would be better if she went home. Priam treats her gently and asks her to name the Achaean leaders, and she answers with grief rather than coquetry.

When she sees Menelaus winning the duel, Aphrodite carries Paris away and forces Helen to go to him. Her resistance is real: she calls herself shameless and hates the goddess’s command, but she obeys. The poem never settles the question of how far she consented to the original departure, and later Greek writers argued it endlessly.

In Iliad VI Hector finds her in the palace and she reproaches herself: she wishes she had died before following Paris, and she says that she and Paris are the subject of song for people yet to come. She speaks of Hector’s kindness to her, which contrasts with the hostility of the rest of Troy. Helen’s self-condemnation is one of the poem’s sharpest instruments: it lets the Trojans blame the war on her while making her the most articulate witness of its cost.

In Iliad XXIV she joins the lament for Hector, calling him the one who never spoke a harsh word to her. Coming after Hecabe and Andromache, her lament completes the poem’s picture of the Trojan household and gives the woman who caused the war a place among its mourners.

The Odyssey meets Helen again in Sparta, settled with Menelaus and receiving Telemachus. She recognizes him, interprets omens, and tells stories about Odysseus; the household is prosperous, but the memory of Troy is everywhere. She puts a drug into the wine to quiet grief, and the poem presents her as a woman who has survived by learning to manage memory.

Later tradition supplied the story of Leda and the egg, and debated whether she went to Troy at all or stayed in Egypt while a phantom went with Paris. The Iliad knows nothing of the phantom. It gives us a Helen who is at once the cause of the war, a victim of the gods, and a woman whose voice the poem refuses to silence.