The Myth of Helen | The Odyssey, Troy, Helen, Paris, Menelaus — Relationships and Ending Explained

On the walls of Troy, an old man calls a young woman to sit beside him. He is the aged king Priam, and the woman sitting next to him is Helen. Below the walls, the Greek army is encamped on the plain, and Priam asks Helen who that remarkably tall and imposing commander down there is.

What makes this scene so striking is that the woman blamed as the cause of a war that has dragged on for years appears in the position of having to point out, one by one, the faces of the enemy commanders. Helen is the reason for this war, and at the same time the person who watches it from closest range — yet most helplessly.

Naming the enemy commanders one by one from the walls

Helen first points to Agamemnon. She introduces him as a fine king and a brave warrior, and also notes that he is the brother of her husband Menelaus. The myth of Agamemnon covers in more detail what kind of death this figure later meets.

When Priam asks again about a man who is short but broad-shouldered, Helen answers that he is Odysseus, son of Laertes, famed for his cunning. Antenor, a Trojan elder standing nearby, adds a remark. He says he once saw Odysseus in person, when he came to Troy as an envoy alongside Menelaus over the matter of Helen.

Antenor remembers two things, from two different moments. One is the appearance of the two envoys. When they stood side by side before the Trojans, Menelaus looked the more imposing with his broader shoulders, but once the two men sat down, Odysseus radiated a far more kingly dignity.

The other is the impression Odysseus made when he rose to speak. With his eyes cast down and the staff in his hand held still, he seemed rather foolish at first — but the moment he opened his mouth, his words poured out like a winter snowstorm, and no one could withstand him.

Another commander stands out, a giant of a man whose head and shoulders tower above the others. Helen explains that he is Ajax, a bulwark of the Greek army.

Yet there was one face she could not find, no matter how she looked. Her two brothers, Castor and Polydeuces. Helen passes on, unable to say for certain herself whether they had stayed behind in their homeland of Lacedaemon, or whether they were ashamed of the trouble she had caused and so did not join the war.

"I wish I had never come to this place"

Between pointing out the commanders, Helen also speaks of herself. She says it would have been better to die before coming to this place — then she would not have left behind her daughter, her bedchamber, and the companions of her childhood.

In a single scene, the label of the woman who started the war and the plight of a woman who, in the very midst of that war, longs for her daughter and her old home are placed side by side.

Before Paris went to Sparta — already decided outside Troy

The Iliad itself does not explain from the start why Helen is in Troy. The story begins ten years into the war, long after Helen's arrival in Troy.

What came before is filled in by other mythological sources. After a dispute among the goddesses, Paris was made the judge of who was the most beautiful, and Aphrodite won his choice by promising him the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife. Following that promise, Paris set sail for Sparta, where Helen lived.

In other words, the starting point of this myth is not a scene in which Helen herself makes a decision, but a sequence in which a promise among the gods came first, and as a result Paris came looking for her. The circumstances of how Paris came to stand before that judgment are covered separately in the myth of Paris.

After the scene on the walls — the duel and what followed

What follows Helen's scene of naming the commanders is a one-on-one duel between Paris and Menelaus. An agreement had been made beforehand that the two would fight directly over Helen to end the war.

Menelaus had the upper hand, pressing Paris so hard that he seized his helmet strap and dragged him along. But the goddess Aphrodite intervened, rescued Paris, wrapped him in mist, and carried him straight to his bedchamber.

Aphrodite then went to bring Helen to that chamber. At first Helen refused outright. She said she could not go back to his bed now, and that if she did, she would become the talk of every woman in Troy.

Then Aphrodite flew into a rage. She threatened that if Helen kept provoking her, she would come to hate her as much as she had loved her until now, and would abandon her to her fate. Frightened by these words, Helen threw on her cloak and silently followed the goddess. The key point of this passage is that it is not a scene of Helen leaving of her own will, but one in which she refused, then was dragged along, overpowered by the goddess's threat.

Years later — a wedding feast in Sparta, after the war

The same Helen, much later and after the war had ended, is seated in a completely different setting. When Telemachus, son of Odysseus, set out on a long journey in search of news of his father, the people he met at the Spartan palace he arrived at were Menelaus and Helen.

Telemachus asks Menelaus to tell him anything he knows about his father, saying that his own household is being ruined by suitors. The other strand of this journey in search of his father continues in more detail in the Odyssey plot summary.

Now, on the very day Telemachus arrived, the palace was in the midst of a wedding feast. Menelaus was celebrating two weddings at once: the marriage of his daughter to the son of the famous Achilles, and the marriage of his son Megapenthes. It is striking that this marriage, sending the daughter off to the groom's family, ties back into the family line of the myth of Achilles.

One thing should be noted here. The son getting married that day, Megapenthes, was not Helen's son but a son Menelaus had by another woman. The only child said to be Helen's own is her daughter Hermione.

The Helen who once met Paris again in his chamber now sits as the mistress of the house, hosting guests while the family weddings are celebrated under one roof with Menelaus. The ending Homer gives to Helen's story is precisely this scene — living with her husband in Sparta.

A husband and wife who bring up two different events

At the feast, the two each tell their guests about what they experienced in Troy. But the anecdotes they bring up are not from the same day — they are two events from different times and situations, and within them Helen's position is the exact opposite.

What Helen brings up first is from before the wooden horse appeared. She says that when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar and even wounding his own body, slipped into Troy to spy, she was the only one who recognized him. She adds that she was also the one who seized him and questioned him while everyone else failed to notice him.

The memory Menelaus brings up next is from much later, a different event around the end of the war. He tells of the night the Greek soldiers were hidden inside the great wooden horse, when Helen circled around it, imitating one by one the voices of the Greek commanders' wives. The hidden soldiers, stirred by the voices of the wives they longed for, were on the verge of answering — and Odysseus barely prevented their discovery by clamping his hand over Anticlus's mouth.

Helen tells the story as someone who helped the Greek side, while Menelaus tells it as someone who nearly wrecked the whole disguise. They each chose a different event, yet the picture of Helen within them is the exact opposite — leaving the impression that the memory of the war still lies unsettled between this husband and wife.

A drug that wipes away tears — Helen as the mistress of the house

When the guests shed tears at the memory of old times, Helen secretly slips into the wine a drug that makes one forget sorrow and worry. It is said that whoever drinks it will shed no tears for the whole of that day.

This drug is introduced as one that Polydamna, the wife of Thon in Egypt, once gave to Helen. Before the people who shared in the tragedy of Troy, Helen now takes on even the role of governing that sorrow.

Where to take this story next

The woman who once named the enemy commanders one by one from the walls and the mistress who slips a drug into her guests' wine in Sparta are the same person. If you want to see the ten years between them entirely from the side of the war, continue on to the Trojan War plot summary.

The process by which Helen left Troy and came to sit again in Sparta is something Homer skips over rather than showing as a scene. Into that gap, multiple differing versions have been handed down, from stories that she stayed in Egypt to later film adaptations.

If you want to follow this couple's relationship further from the husband's point of view, continue with the myth of Menelaus.