For Star Trek’s audience, Elaan is not only the barbarian （the Enterprise and her crew are the civilizing force in this and almost all Star Trek episodes）。 She is also the warrior. We don’t meet her Troyian husband-to-be, but his ambassador is somewhat snooty and effete. He is certainly no match for Elaan when she loses patience and stabs him: only the swift attention of the medical team of the Enterprise saves his life. It is – no huge surprise – Captain Kirk who ends up having to be a civilizing influence on Elaan. Well, civilizing in some ways: again, fifty years after its initial broadcast, we flinch to see him hit her after she has hit him.
The elements of the story which more closely retell the Helen myth are equally interesting. Elaan’s beauty and charisma are so remarkable that, when she is beamed on board the Enterprise, the crew spontaneously go down on bended knee to her. Even Mr Spock, who is famously, half-Vulcanly unemotional, is compelled to kneel before her, albeit with one eyebrow raised. In the time-honoured tradition of a romantic comedy, Elaan and Kirk argue, hate each other and then fall in love. We might wonder if this is to be another twist on the story we think we know: perhaps this is the forbidden relationship that Helen/Elaan should not be having, while her absent Troyian groom is not Paris, the adulterer, but rather a virtual Menelaus – the man who has claim to her, but foolishly leaves her alone in the company of one of history’s （or, rather, the future’s） great womanizers.
Sabotage, Klingon attacks and a last-minute fix of the warp drive by the tireless Scotty accompany the Enterprise as she makes her way to Troyius. By the time they reach their destination, we are genuinely worried for Captain Kirk: he has witnessed Elaan’s tears, which, we are told, means he will be enslaved for life. Dr McCoy heroically works to create an antidote to this biochemical reaction, but the episode ends with Kirk not needing it after all: he is sitting on the bridge of his ship, perfectly content. How? Well, as Spock points out, Kirk’s great love is the Enterprise, which infected him long before Elaan did. It is another nice twist on the Helen myth: after her relationship with Paris ends, she goes back to her first husband, Menelaus. In Star Trek, Elaan has no first husband. Rather, it is Kirk who returns to his first love. And so the story of Helen, Paris and Menelaus is cleverly broken up and reformed to lose a war and gain a spaceship.
Strange variants on the Helen story are not a preserve of science fiction, incidentally. Even Star Trek might stop short of the Helens we see in the work of an obscure ancient author, Ptolemaeus Chennos or Ptolemy the Quail. This Ptolemy lived in Alexandria, in Egypt, at the beginning of the second century CE. He composed a Strange History – a set of peculiar stories based on Greek myths. For him, there are many Helens,37 which he has presumably collected from other mythographers: there is Helen, the daughter of Leda, who gave Paris （Alexandros） a daughter, and had an uncanny knack of imitating voices （this unlikely nugget is also in Homer）。38 But then, after the Trojan War, there are multiple Helens: one, a daughter of Clytemnestra, who is killed by Orestes, one who worked with Aphrodite, one who raised Romulus and Remus. He mentions a woman who ate three kid goats a day who is also called Helen （though presumably she may have been too busy digesting goat to answer to her name）。 And then there is the daughter of Musaeus, a poet who wrote about the Trojan War in the eighth century BCE, before Homer. This Helen owned a diglosson arnion – ‘a bilingual sheep’。39 It’s impossible to see how this Helen isn’t the most famous woman in the ancient world, when one comes across a bilingual sheep so rarely. Ptolemy also mentions a Helen who was loved by the poet Stesichorus, Helen of Himera. This is a particularly cute point because one story which the ancients told about Stesichorus was that he lost his sight after writing ungenerously about Helen of Troy. His vision was only restored when he composed a more generous account of her. Let that be a lesson to us all.
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Perhaps the most extraordinary Helen is one who doesn’t survive, however. There is a lost tragedy by Sophocles, called The Demand for Helen’s Return.40 Only a few tiny fragments exist today, so we can get little sense of the plot overall. But the Helen they depict is a remarkable variation on the version we have seen in Homer and Euripides. This Helen is so tormented by her wrongdoing that she is considering suicide by drinking poison: bull’s blood. A second fragment describes her driving writing implements – pencils – into her cheek. None of the Helens we have met – from the child bride in the story of Theseus to the adulterous woman in Homer, from the powerful orator in Euripides to the self-possessed wife in Ovid – none of these women is as pitiable as this Sophoclean creation: a woman so damaged by a lifetime of being defined by her beauty that she finally seeks to obliterate it by self-harm. And not just self-harm, but the most horrific, visible kind: she specifically disfigures her face which so many men have sought to possess. That she uses the precise tool which poets and scribes have used to create her myth, to tell her story kindly and unkindly, fairly or unfairly, is especially poignant. The greatest beauty the world had ever known, trying to take away the cause for all those words written about her, using the object which wrote them. Perhaps this is an image – however distressing – we need to keep in our minds when we think about Helen. That whether or not we consider her responsible for a war （or two wars） matters less than what she believes.