So, even as a child, Helen apparently caused a war. But most of us would feel that this was an unfair characterization of the events described above. Surely we would all stop short of blaming a child for her own abduction? In fact, it is the behaviour of Theseus and Pirithoos – determined to take wives with little thought for the consequences – and the response of Castor and Polydeuces that causes blood to be shed. Helen is nothing but a beautiful pawn.
So what of the second war fought over Helen? The Trojan War is one of literature’s greatest stories, an epic saga which has shaped storytelling in the western world for more than two and half thousand years. Two of our very earliest texts tell the story of this conflict, one way or another: Homer’s Iliad is set in the final, tenth year of the war, his Odyssey in its aftermath. And who do the Greeks and Trojans alike blame for the catastrophic loss of life on all sides? Helen, of course. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Hecabe, the queen of Troy, finally meets Menelaus, Helen’s Greek husband who waged a ten-year war for her return. Her first words to this man who has cost her everything – her husband, her sons, her city – are brutal: I praise you, Menelaus, if you’ll kill your wife. Avoid seeing her, or she’ll fill you with longing. She captures the eyes of men, destroys their cities, burns down their houses, she has such magical power. I know her, and you know her, and so does everyone who has suffered.11
It is a bracing introduction to the woman who is about to arrive onstage. Before we look at Helen’s response, let’s go back to the very beginning of the war. In fact, let’s go back earlier still, to see how justified Hecabe’s fury might be. What did persuade all those Greeks to set sail for Troy and fight for the return of the wife of a man many of them would never even have met? And how did Helen end up married to Menelaus in the first place?
Ostensibly, Helen’s stepfather, Tyndareus, has a minor role in her story. But if we are to give any single mortal the blame for setting the Trojan War in motion, we might legitimately say it was him. Faced with a flotilla of suitors for his beautiful stepdaughter, he was nervous of choosing one over the others. Kings from all over Greece – either in person or by messenger, depending on the version of the story we read – made their offers for Helen when she reached marriageable age. The offers were all accompanied by gifts, which must have dulled the pain of betrothal admin a little. But Tyndareus could see the risks involved: whomever he chose as the lucky bridegroom, he would be making very many more enemies than friends. And given the power disparities between the suitors – some able to command large armies, others less so – how to pick one without several other mighty candidates either declaring war or abducting Helen? As we have seen, this wasn’t an idle concern: heroes like Theseus and Pirithoos might well have decided that they were entitled to the most beautiful woman in the world.
So Tyndareus came up with a plan. In order to be considered as Helen’s potential husband, the suitors had to pledge an oath （in person, if they had turned up in Sparta to make their case. At home, taken on trust, if they were conducting the whole thing remotely）。 This story wasn’t mentioned by Homer in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, but it was almost certainly related by Stesichorus in the mid-sixth century BCE, and later writers like Pseudo-Apollodorus also refer to it, with varying numbers and names of suitors.12 Each man had to swear that, if he was unlucky in his bid for Helen, he nonetheless agreed that he would fight for her safe return to her husband, whoever he was, if she was taken away by another man.
The simplicity of the plan was impressive. All those rival claims, all the potential jealousies cancelled out at a stroke: the price for having a chance to marry Helen was defending the man who did marry Helen. Pseudo-Apollodorus also tells us that Odysseus came up with the idea for this oath, and it has the ring of an Odyssean scheme: simple, brilliant, but with a sting in the tail. Once all had agreed to it, either Tyndareus chose Menelaus or, as Euripides and other writers13 have it, Helen chose her own bridegroom. And if every suitor was less than delighted, then at least they could be content that a war of the kind begun by Theseus with the Dioscuri had been averted: no Greek hero would be so foolish as to take on the collective might of every other Greek leader. The only thing which didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone, not even the sharp-witted Odysseus, was that Helen might be taken from her home by a man who hadn’t sworn the oath. One who wasn’t even a Greek.
Paris, or Alexandros （to give him the name some Greek writers prefer）， was a Trojan prince. The son of Priam and Hecabe, the king and queen of Troy, he seduced or abducted Helen from her home in Sparta, again depending on the version of the myth you prefer. In the Iliad, Homer has Helen berate herself for eloping with Paris,14 saying she should have drowned in the sea before she had come with him to Troy. She wishes that Paris had been a better man, but it is herself she wishes dead. She blames them both for Troy’s predicament, but she names herself first: ‘because of me and Alexandros . . .’ And this version of the story – handsome prince meets beautiful queen, who abandons her husband to run away with him – provides the ammunition Hecabe needs for her vitriolic assessment of Helen’s character in The Trojan Women. Indeed, it has provided countless writers with the opportunity to blame Helen for the war: she is the face that launched a thousand ships, after all. Paris’ lovely face doesn’t warrant a mention, apparently.