Finally, Helen addresses her own weakness in falling for Paris. What led me to betray my fatherland for a stranger? she asks. Well, even Zeus can’t resist Aphrodite: he holds power over the other gods, but he’s a slave to her. So you should make allowances for me.20 And this is certainly the impression we get of Aphrodite from most sources: she is irresistible to gods, let alone mortals （or demi-gods）。
One last charge to answer, Helen says: why didn’t I come back to you, Menelaus, after Paris died? Well, I tried. I was caught pollakis – ‘many times’ – trying to escape Troy and return to you. I was taken bia – ‘by force’ – as a wife by Deiphobos. The use of bia is unequivocal: Helen has been in a forced marriage since the death of Paris. She describes herself in this last relationship one more time: pikrōs edouleus – ‘bitterly enslaved’。
Isn’t our view of Helen changed by this extraordinary speech? The woman who is mute in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is as clever and articulate as she is beautiful in Euripides’ The Trojan Women. The catalogue of wrongs done to her is remarkable. Perhaps we don’t agree with her interpretation of every event （Hecabe certainly doesn’t: she responds to Helen’s defence, since she is clearly better-equipped than Menelaus for a battle of wits）。 But Helen’s arguments are compelling: Aphrodite really is that powerful, Menelaus really did abandon her with Paris. Hecabe doesn’t answer Helen’s point about her repeated attempts to escape, she instead asks why Helen didn’t kill herself as she should have （she doesn’t suggest that Paris might have done the same, for shame at having brought war upon his home and family. Or indeed that she and Priam might have done so, having failed to act on the prophecy which had warned them that Paris would destroy their city if he was allowed to live）。 The final straw for Hecabe is that Helen has appeared – in the aftermath of the fall of Troy when everyone else is wearing rags – perfectly dressed.21
At the end of this extraordinary debate, Menelaus declares himself in agreement with Hecabe. And yet, rather than kill Helen, he orders his men to put her on his ship bound for Sparta. Euripides’ audience （who would surely have known her role in the Odyssey, which we’ll come to shortly） knows what Hecabe immediately realizes: there is no way Menelaus will kill Helen once they get home.
There is an interesting question raised by Helen’s speech which she doesn’t ask. Why was Paris chosen to judge between the goddesses? And did no one care about the catastrophic consequences of his choice? Paris was simply given the job of deciding which goddess should take home the coveted trophy: a golden apple, with the words tē kallistē – ‘for the most beautiful’ – engraved on it. The apple was dropped among the goddesses at the wedding of Thetis, a sea-nymph, who would go on to be the mother of Achilles. They squabbled over who it was for, but they never asked who dropped it. If they had, they might have discovered it was Eris, the goddess of strife and discord. In other words, the whole point of the apple was to cause trouble, and it does.
So how does Paris find himself in the invidious position of being the judge? It’s inconceivable that he could pick one goddess over the other two and not acquire a pair of seriously powerful enemies. Who would agree to perform such an unenviable task? The answer is that Zeus decides Paris should do the choosing （no fool he: Zeus would have been choosing between his wife and sister, Hera, his daughter Athene, and the goddess who can cause him so much trouble, Aphrodite. No wonder he directs Hermes to put some hapless mortal on the case instead）。 And from the moment Paris makes his choice, Troy is in jeopardy. Throughout Greek myth, Hera is especially unforgiving of any slight （as women seduced by Zeus usually discover to their cost）。
Which brings us back to the original question: why do the gods give the decision to Paris, in particular? The answer is that they want Troy to have powerful enemies or （if Helen was correct in her prediction of what would have happened to Menelaus and the Greeks had Paris chosen Hera or Athene as the recipient of the apple） to become a powerful threat to the Greeks. The gods have deliberately, intentionally stirred up trouble between the Greeks and the Trojans, and they have used Paris and Helen to do so.
If we keep following the causation of the war back, step by step, we eventually find ourselves here: the war is caused by Paris taking Helen from Menelaus, but Helen is promised to Paris by Aphrodite in exchange for the golden apple, and the apple is put in among the goddesses by Eris, and she gets it from where? We’re told in the lost epic poem Cypria that Themis （the goddess of Order） and Zeus planned the Trojan War between them. One ancient commentator on the Iliad tells us why that might have been: the earth was groaning beneath the weight of so many people. Zeus had instigated an earlier war （the Theban wars, which, as we saw, blighted the life of Jocasta）。 In the ensuing years, the number of mortals continued to rocket. Another war was needed. It is a powerful metaphor, and interesting that the notion of the earth being too full of too many people is not one which arrived among us when the global population hit the billions. Rather, it began when the earth held only tens of millions.22