Helen | Greek mythology | Britannica.com Greek mythology Alternative Titles: Helen of Troy, Helene Related Topics Aphrodite Helen, Greek Helene, in Greek legend , the most beautiful woman of Greece and the indirect cause of the Trojan War . She was daughter of Zeus , either by Leda or by Nemesis , and sister of the Dioscuri . As a young girl she was carried off by Theseus , but she was rescued by her brothers. She was also the sister of Clytemnestra , who married Agamemnon . Her suitors came from all parts of Greece, and from among them she chose Menelaus , Agamemnon’s younger brother. During an absence of Menelaus, however, Helen fled to Troy with Paris , son of the Trojan king Priam ; when Paris was slain, she married his brother Deiphobus, whom she betrayed to Menelaus when Troy was subsequently captured. Menelaus and she then returned to Sparta , where they lived happily until their deaths. The abduction of Helen, bas-relief; in the Lateran Museum, Rome.

Alinari/Art Resource, New York According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes , where she was hanged by the Rhodian queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan War. The poet Stesichorus , however, related in his second version of her story that she and Paris were driven ashore on the coast of Egypt and that Helen was detained there by King Proteus . The Helen carried on to Troy was thus a phantom, and the real one was recovered by her husband from Egypt after the war. This version of the story was used by Euripides in his play Helen. Helen Brought to Paris, oil on canvas by Benjamin West, 1776; in the Smithsonian American … Photograph by pohick2. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Museum purchase, 1969.33 Helen was worshipped and had a festival at Therapnae in Laconia ; she also had a temple at Rhodes, where she was worshipped as Dendritis (the tree goddess).

Like her brothers, the Dioscuri, she was a patron deity of sailors. Her name is pre-Hellenic and in cult may go back to the pre-Greek periods. Learn More in these related articles: Helen Helen by James Hunter Helen (often called "Helen of Troy") was the daughter of Leda and Zeus , and was the sister of the Dioscuri and Clytemnestra . Since Zeus visited Leda in the form of a swan, Helen was often presented as being born from an egg. She was reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. When Helen was still a child, she was abducted by Theseus . Since she was not yet old enough to be married, he sent her to Aphidnae and left her in the care of his mother, Aethra . The Dioscuri rescued her and returned her to her home in Lacedaemon, taking Aethra prisoner at the same time. When Helen reached marriageable age, all the greatest men in Greece courted her. Her mother's husband, King Tyndareos of Lacedaemon, was concerned about the trouble that might be caused by the disappointed suitors.

Acting on the advice of Odysseus , he got all the suitors to swear that they would support the marriage rights of the successful candidate. He then settled on Menelaus to be the husband of Helen. She lived happily with Menelaus for a number of years, and bore him a daughter, Hermione . After a decade or so of married life, Helen was abducted by -- or ran off with -- Paris , the son of King Priam of Troy. Menelaus called on the other suitors to fulfill their oaths and help him get her back. As a result, the Greek leaders mustered the greatest army of the time, placed it under the command of Agamemnon , and set off to wage what became known as the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, Menelaus took Helen back to Lacedaemon, where they lived an apparently happy married life once more. After the end of their mortal existence, they continued to be together in Elysium. There were a number of different accounts of Helen's relationship with Paris. In some, she was truly in love with him, although her sympathies were mostly with the Greeks who beseiged Troy.

In others, she was a beautiful and wanton woman who brought disaster upon those around her. In still other accounts, she never went to Troy at all: Hermes , acting on Zeus's orders, spirited her away to Egypt and fashioned a phantom out of clouds to accompany Paris; the real Helen was reunited with Menelaus after the Trojan War.

Article details: Helen of Troy (Greek myth) HELEN OF TROY Identity/Class: Demi-goddess Occupation: Goddess of beauty and perfection, former monarch Group Membership: Venus' ten handmaidens (including Bilitis, Cleopatra , Du Barry, Juliet, Liti, Psyche , Salome, unidentified others), Affiliations: Olympian gods , Paris , Maria Storm , Trojan forces at Troy Enemies: Achilles and the Greek armies, Megapenthes, Nicostratus, Odysseus , Orestes, Polyxo and her maids Known Relatives: Zeus (father), Leda (mother, deceased?), Tyndareus (foster father), Menelaus (estranged husband), Catreus (father in law, deceased), Polydeuces (brother, alias Pollux, deceased?), Castor (half-brother, deceased), Clytemnestra (half-sister, deceased), Pleisthenes (son, deceased), Hermione (daughter, deceased), Molossus (son in law, deceased), Orestes (nephew/son in law, deceased), Tisamenus (grandson, deceased), Heracles, Apollo , Ares, Hephaestus ,

 Hermes , Dionysus (half-brothers), Artemis , Athena , Venus , Eris , Eileithyia, Hebe , Pandia (half-sisters) Aliases: Pandia?

(see Comments) Base of Operations: Olympus; formerly ancient Sparta (now part of modern Greece), formerly Troy (now part of modern Turkey) First Appearance: Venus#1 (August, 1948) Powers/Abilities: As a goddess, Helen possesses several attributes of the Olympian Gods such as superhuman strength (Class 20 at least), longevity, vitality, resistance to harm and eternal life just so long as she ate ambrosia and drank nectar made from the apples of immortality. She might have limited mystical skills to at least cross barriers between dimensions and possibly even limited clairvoyance. As a mortal, she had none of these powers except for her Olympian beauty and perfection. History: (Greek Legend)- Helen is the daughter of Zeus and the Calydonian princess, Leda, a wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta. Leda had a vision of her pregnancy in which a swan bestowed her four eggs out of which sprang her four children. Spartan priests translated the dream by claiming it meant that some of her children were going to be of divine birth.

Helen grew up to be particularly beautiful and her mortal guardian King Tyndareus sought to prevent bloodshed by forcing her suitors to exacting a vow of non-violence and by standing by the side of Helen’s husband to protect her. King Theseus of Athens and his close friend, Peirithous, Leader of the Lapith tribes, however, had both made vows to marry daughters of Zeus. While Helen was only twelve years old, Thesus abducted from her Sparta and left her in the custody of his mother in Aphidnae. While Theseus and Peirithous left to kidnap Persephone from the Underworld, Castor and Pollux invaded Aphidnae, rescued Helen and left the throne in the hands of Theseus’s enemies. Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, was taken by King Agamemnon of Mycenae which left Tyndareus without a successor to his throne. He betrothed Helen to Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, who then replaced him on the throne of Sparta. Helen, however, ended up promised to Paris, a prince of Troy, by the goddess Aphrodite.

While Menelaus was absent for the funeral of King Catreus, Paris spirited Helen out of Sparta and took her to Troy. Menelaus on his return called the kings and warriors on their vow to Tyndareus and declared war on a ten-year battle to be called the Trojan War. (Thor Annual#8)- Lost in time and space in the caves under Asgard, the Asgardian God Thor befriended Dardanian prince Aeneas and fought with him to defend Troy against the hordes of Greek armies. During his combat, he had a brief glimpse of Helen watching the war from the towers of Troy. Loki, the god of mischief, was also lost in that time and gave Odysseus the idea for the Wooden Horse. (Greek Legend)- Helen somehow realized the Greeks were hiding in the horse and tried to dissuade them from more bloodshed but they ignored her. After Paris’s death, Helen was abducted by his brother as a concubine, but Paris' brother was killed by Menelaus who had secured his way past the Trojan walls inside the Wooden Horse. Menelaus also wanted to kill Helen for her role in the war, but could not bring himself to carry through the act.

Aphrodite then instructed Hermes to spirit Helen to Egypt where she was hid from Menelaus by King Proteus. Menelaus tracked her there from advice given him by Athena. Proteus removed Helen’s memories of the war with water from the river Lethe as she returned to Menelaus. In the aftermath of Agamemnon’s death, Menelaus’s nephew Orestes came to him for absolution in the murders of his mother and her lover. Refused a defense, he tried to kill Helen for the grief caused in her wake and Aphrodite again advised Hermes to spirit her off this time to Olympus. Helen meanwhile desired to return to Menelaus, but after his death, she was driven from Sparta by her step-sons Nicostratus and Megapenthes. She fled to Rhodes to live with Polyxo, one of the widows from Troy, who saw her and realized this was her chance to avenge her husband. She instructed her maids to impersonate Erinnyes, goddesses of punishment, and to slay her, but Aphrodite rescued Helen again and the maids had to fabricate a murder for Helen’s absence.

Believing Helen was dead, the Spartans placed a marker in her name next to Menelaus’s tomb. (Venus#1/2)- To prove her worth as an editor to Whitney Hammond, Venus recruited ten of her handmaidens---including Cleopatra , Helen of Troy, and Salome---to come to Earth as part of a Beauty Magazine project focusing on beautiful women, thus beating the line-up in their rival publication Lovely Lady Magazine. (Venus#11/1) - When Michael Templar 's machine threatened to plunge Earth into the sun, Helen of Troy was among Venus' handmaidens who bestowed their beauty to Templar's lab assistant, the plain Maria Storm; upon seeing the transformed Maria, Templar fell in love with her and reversed the machine, sparing the world. 'Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation' by Ruby Blondell, Reviewed | New Republic Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation by Ruby Blondell (Oxford University Press) Émile Zola’s gripping novel Nana (1880) evokes the rise, fall, and early death of a sexy blonde teenager, a celebrity actress and prostitute, who takes all of Paris by storm.

She destroys every man who crosses her path before herself dying a dismal death of smallpox, portending the fall of the Second Empire. The novel is part of Zola’s series on urban industrialization and its threat to traditional family life. Nana, although theoretically human, is a destructive and powerful machine, the engine of the new civilization as well as the motor of Zola’s novelistic plot. Her sexual allure, figured as an irresistible scent, is in the end transformed into, or revealed as, the seeping putrefaction of the charnel house. This is one of the most powerful modern versions of a far more widespread misogynistic trope. Heterosexual male desire for an exceptionally attractive woman tends to be projected onto the woman herself, who is then presented as particularly lustful. Since male desire can be experienced as mysterious, bewildering, and overwhelming, the woman herself must be destructive and deceptive, perhaps possessed of magical witch-like powers. In ancient Greek mythology, one of the female characters who fits this general model is Pandora, the female sent by Zeus to punish humans for Prometheus’s theft of fire and to end the Golden Age, when she opens the jar of death, pain, and other evils upon the world.

This is a relatively straightforward presentation of the beautiful woman as a mechanism for disaster—a mere instrument of divine vengeance. But Hesiod adds that Pandora herself had agency, “strength,” a “mind,” and a “voice,” allowing her to “devise” evils for humanity, when she made the fateful choice to open the jar—an action that, as Ruby Blondell rightly notes, has obvious sexual overtones. The problem with Pandora, as with all beautiful women in a patriarchal society, is that she is “more than a statue. And there’s the rub.” The urge to objectify a desirable woman is undermined by the acknowledgment that she might be human; at the same time, her capacity for agency and choice only reinforces her desirability (and makes her seem all the more dangerous). Illustration by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme Ruby Blondell’s insightful study of ancient Greek representations of Helen of Troy notes the close connections between her subject and the Pandora myth.

Both, she argues, spring from cultural anxieties about female beauty and female sexuality, centered on the figure of the parthenos—the girl at marriageable age, a liminal figure who must cross from the world of childhood in her father’s house to the house of her husband. “She must be sufficiently reluctant to suggest that she will not stray once she is married, but she must also actively desire her new husband”—a balance that constantly threatens to tip over. Helen, the most famous adulterous wife in the Western tradition, is figured as a woman who is constantly in this liminal state, and who repeatedly crosses over from one household to another: “many-manned Helen,” as Aeschylus calls her. She was (and is) the locus for exploring the questions of whether beautiful women are always necessarily bad, and whether female sexual desire is always a force of destruction. She is also—unlike modern versions of the promiscuous or adulterous woman—always presented as at least semi-divine, the ever-young, ever-beautiful daughter of Zeus, worshipped at cult centers all over Greece, especially in her native Sparta.

Modern versions of misogyny usually do not account for the possibility that “bad” women might also be goddesses. The best-seller about Helen of Troy by the television presenter Bettany Hughes, from 2007, bizarrely claimed to tell, and to celebrate, “Helen as a real character from history,” while acknowledging that her existence is only “a possibility”—as if the biography of a mythical character from three thousand years ago could possibly be reconstructed. Blondell has almost none of this naïveté: she notes explicitly that her subject is a set of cultural tropes, not a historical person. Helen was a construction of the Greek male imagination, and the myths and literary treatments of Helen can teach us nothing about the lives even of women in classical Greece, let alone women in Sparta in the Bronze Age: she is “a concept, not a person.” But these myths can teach us a great deal about the complex attitudes of ancient Greek men, mostly ancient Athenian men, toward women, female beauty, and male desire.

The story goes that Zeus wanted to reduce the human population, so he arranged for the birth of the two characters who would make the Trojan War inevitable: Achilles and Helen, representing “seductive female beauty and destructive male strength.” They have in common an extraordinary self-awareness and concern for their future reputations in myth and legend. Both were half-human, half-divine, Achilles being the son of the mortal Peleus by the sea-goddess Thetis, and Helen the daughter of Zeus in the form of a swan and of the Spartan queen Leda. Owing to this parentage, she hatched from an egg—the first mark of her unusual, not-quite-human status. Helen is the only female child of Zeus by a mortal woman, an exceptional woman in this as in every other respect. Other versions of the myth suggest that she was the daughter of Nemesis, or “Destruction.” Helen’s beauty is not subjective. A key premise of the myth is that she is beautiful in some absolute and total way that defies description, and hence can be represented only by entirely conventional means. Helen, like any other beautiful woman in the Greek literary tradition, has lovely cheeks, neat ankles, and pretty accessories.

She is equally irresistible to any and every man. As Blondell neatly puts it, “a beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.” From a young age, Helen was prone to getting abducted. When she was still a young girl the Athenian hero Theseus swiped her, but she was retrieved by her magical brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux. A little later, suitors from all over Greece began to court her, and took an oath that they would all fight together for her eventual husband. Menelaus of Mycenae, whose main claim to fame was his wealth, won Helen as his wife. But some time afterward, a Trojan prince named Paris was appointed to judge between three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. He chose Aphrodite, goddess of love, because she promised him Helen as a reward—the only problem being that Helen was married already. The abduction of Helen caused the Trojan War.

Helen might thus be seen as a mere puppet, the victim of the gods and of the men who wanted her. But as Blondell insists, “her complicity is essential to her story.” Helen is abducted, but she is never simply passive. She agrees to go with Paris, although different versions of the story suggest different degrees of willingness. Both Paris and Helen are victims of lust, but are still committing an action and incurring moral responsibility for the deaths that result: “such acts are still acts.” The verbs most commonly used for Helen’s journey are all active: she left, she went, she sailed away. The Greek texts seem constantly to return to the issue of Helen’s responsibility for her actions. If she really did choose to leave her husband, can we forgive her? The poet of the Iliad makes her a sympathetic figure by suggesting that she can never forgive herself: we see her reproaching herself for her actions, and blaming the whole war on herself. She can maintain an identity as a good woman only by insisting on her own evil. In the Odyssey, Helen is shown back home with her husband, Menelaus, in an uneasy restoration of domestic harmony.

Yet Blondell nicely shows that there is no clear line between Helen and the other wives of the poem. Penelope, unlike Helen, sticks to one man; but both are good at weaving and telling stories, in a somewhat scary way, and both have a “palpably destructive” beauty, which attracts too many suitors and raises inevitable doubts about whether the woman can be trusted to be true to her husband or her word. Blondell is particularly good on the ways that the characters surrounding Helen are presented as parallel to her. Menelaus is marked as the “quintessential cuckold,” and is made unmasculine by marrying a woman who is so powerfully feminine that she comes close to achieving masculine kinds of authority. Paris is emasculated in a different way: he is too similar to Helen herself, and his beauty is presented as effeminate and worthy of blame. In tragedy—Aeschylus’s Oresteia being the richest example—Helen is a mirror image of her sister Clytemnestra. Both are too clever by half, and both are explicitly blamed for the destruction of their men, although Helen remains the root of all evil.

As Blondell notes, the chorus in Agamemnon implies (absurdly) that Helen’s adultery is far worse than Clytemnestra’s slaughter of her warlord husband: “killing a husband is less heinous than abandoning him.” Blondell’s study is organized chronologically and takes us through the main literary depictions of Helen: from the Homeric poems, through archaic lyric, to Athenian tragedy, Herodotus, and the rhetorical “Praise of Helen” texts by Gorgias and Isocrates. The story that she tells is not only about gender, beauty, and responsibility, but also about how Greek attitudes toward war and nationhood changed, from the almost entirely negative depictions of Helen during the years of the Trojan War to Isocrates’s comically positive account, written after the fall of Athens and defending Helen as the force who brought all of Greece together, united for a common cause.

Each of these writers is conscious of the sound of Helen’s name, which sounds similar to the word for Greece (Hellas), but also to a verb “to destroy”—a homonymity exploited particularly by Aeschylus, who sees Helen as the “ship-destroyer, man-destroyer, city-destroyer”: helenaus, helenadros, heleptolis. Helen the Spartan was a fraught anti-heroine at the time of the Peloponnesian War, when Athens was fighting with Sparta. Why did the Trojans fight a whole war over this woman? Why did the Greeks bother to risk their lives and wealth for somebody else’s wife? These questions are central to almost every treatment of the myth. The notion that a war could ever be fought just for a woman, however beautiful, was a pointed reminder of how utterly foolish the motivations for warfare tend to be.

Herodotus, for example, begins his account of how the wars between east and west, Greece and Persia, first began, with a po-faced but edgy retelling of the myths of Io, Medea, and Helen as a series of abductions that set in motion the conflict that would lead to the great Persian Wars in his own day. In the time of the Peloponnesian War (against Athens’s great enemy, Sparta), Euripides retold the story of Helen at least twice over, in completely different ways, each pointing to the extraordinary and unjustifiable human suffering caused by war. In The Trojan Women, Helen comes on stage as a mistress of rhetoric, able to defend her own position as victim of men and the gods—although her case is rather undermined by the obvious advantages of her own situation compared with that of the other women (grieving for slaughtered loved ones, reduced to slavery, with only exile to look forward to). The Helen story is transformed again in Helen, which dramatizes the idea (perhaps invented by Stesichorus) that Helen never actually went to Troy in the first place.

An image (or eidolon) of her was molded by Hera, and she spent the ten years of the war quite chastely in Egypt, waiting for her beloved husband to come and take her home. But as Blondell well observes, the play actually undermines the contrast on which it relies, between the “fake” Helen and the real one. These two beautiful images turn out to be indistinguishable, such that this “fantasy of female perfection turns out to be, in essence, an illusion.” It is rare for Greek authors to defend Helen’s adultery rather than simply denying that it took place. But Gorgias, the brilliant, stylistically mannered rhetorician of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, does just that in his Encomium of Helen, presenting our heroine as the victim of either deceit or her own weak will: by his argument, nobody is ever really responsible for their own actions. The problem with Helen was not that she was an adulterous woman, but simply that she was human. The piece is clearly designed to shock and entertain an audience ready for new ideas about ethics and human action.

A somewhat more serious defense of Helen was composed by Isocrates in the fourth century, once Athens was no longer the dominant power in the region. Isocrates used Helen in a call for Greek unification against barbarian forces. Helen was the “MacGuffin” who mobilized all Greek men into action, praiseworthy as an emblem of Greece itself: Helen is Hellas. This approach to the myth finally does strip Helen of all agency, since she is important not as a person, or even as an erotic object, but only as a prompt for homosocial bonding. There are hardly any stories about the death of Helen. She is usually imagined as free from the constraints of time, always fixed at the age of a newlywed bride, always beautiful, always ready to be touched again for the very first time. It is possible that the myths became attached to a figure who was originally a prehistoric fertility goddess. She is supposed to have had just one child, a daughter named Hermione, who was herself unable to bear children: infecundity, as Blondell notes, is another mark of Helen’s resistance to time.

She was worshipped at Sparta in a shrine that featured the egg from which she hatched and also the sandal that she lost during her elopement: Helen is not only the ancient equivalent of the nineteenth-century “fallen woman,” but also—more surprisingly—that of Cinderella, the irresistibly pretty young girl for whom it is always midnight as she dashes, half-shod, from one prince to the next. Blondell has written a rich and penetrating study of the Helen myth in the Greek world. She has disappointingly little to say about the reception of Helen after the fourth century BCE—an epilogue of a mere three pages covers the interval between then and now, so that even Rome gets amazingly short shrift. Her epigraphs to each chapter come from modern British and American culture, mostly quotations from rock music and movies, and imply the resonance of the Helen myth with the depiction of obsessively destructive love in contemporary western music; but Blondell says nothing outright about the possibility of connection.

She rightly notes that for much of the twentieth century, other “transgressive” classical heroines have attracted more attention: the androcidal Clytemnestra and the pedicidal Medea had much more obvious appeal in a world where more and more women were trying to reduce their dependence on husband and children (ideally without killing them, but not necessarily). Helen of Troy is a great achievement, because it performs a brilliant critique of a set of patriarchal conventions from antiquity that have by no means disappeared from our own culture. If it is true that the Helen myth has a particular resonance in contemporary America, it is presumably because we as a culture are still grappling with the questions raised by the myth: whether beautiful women are always “bad,” and whether they really count as people. Another reason is that the story of Helen is about desire as something deeply mysterious (despite a proliferation of objectifying eidola), and about how easy it can be for a group of men to decide to go to war on an insufficient or irrelevant pretext. Emily Wilson is associate professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author, most recently, of The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard).

Read More Sign up for your daily dose of politics, culture, and big ideas. Sign Up Greek myths Greek Myths Ancient Greek civilization provided the foundations of Western culture. Philosophically, artistically, scientifically and politically, the Greeks reached an astonishing level of sophistication. The deepest expression of Greek ideology, however, lay in a mythology so rich that its legacy has endured to the present day. Some of the myths date back to the Aegean civilization, whose bull-cult flourished in Crete before 1600 BCE. According to some theories, this society was matriarchal and worshipped above all the Great Goddess or Earth Mother. Later myths show a conflict between matriarchal and patriarchal allegiances, with the patriarchal Olympian gods, headed by sky-god Zeus, gaining ascendancy over the older pantheon that included Ouranos, Gaia, Kronos and Rhea. This is echoed in the myths of other pantheons, such as the Babylonian Marduk overcoming Tiamat. Greek myths in brief Sources There was a strong oral tradition in Greece, as in most other cultures.

However, the particular richness and complexity of Greek mythological owes much to the fact that the stories were fashioned into literature from early times. Hesiod’s Theogony One of the first authors was Hesiod, who wrote his Theogony in the eighth century BCE. This was a long poem in which he attempted to collect together all the myths that had been handed down orally and organize them into a comprehensive genealogy. The genius of Homer Homer’s two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey are thought to have been composed towards the end of the eighth century BCE. The Iliad chiefly recounts events that took place during the Trojan War, concentrating on key heroic figures such as Achilles, Agamemnon and Hector, while the Odyssey relates the adventures of Odysseus on his return journey from Troy. Although he used historical material, Homer’s purpose was not so much to record past events as to give an exciting account of heroic action. The role of the hero More often than not, the subject of Greek myths is heroic. The role of the hero is mapped out in such recurring themes as the separation from the mother, the overcoming of obstacles, and the finding and supplanting of the father.

The great heroes whose lives conform to this pattern include Perseus, Theseus, Jason and Oedipus. Of these, Perseus can be seen as the most faultless of the Greek heroes. He achieves his quest early on in his career through a combination of the aid of the gods and his own prowess. Then, after winning his bride Andromeda, he nobly gives away his kingdom and rules elsewhere. After this he kills his grandfather by accident and through a trial of skill. In this he fulfils the oracle, but incurs no penalty. Gods and Goddesses The gods were differentiated from the heroes not so much by their strength as by their supernatural power. They demanded worship from heroes and men alike and, in return, were able to perform miracles, offer supernatural protection, or give magical gifts - as in the story of Perseus. The Olympian pantheon of gods was the most well-known, each deity possessing a distinctive character. Twelve of them famously lived on Mount Olympus. In addition to these twelve Olympian deities were Hades, who ruled the Underground realm with his queen, Persephone, and also the dark goddess Hecate, who lived with them.

Hestia, goddess of the Hearth, was replaced by Dionysus in the fifth century BCE. In the story which follows, ‘The Judgement of Paris’, we see how the gods could play with the lives of men. Zeus, Thunderer. Ruler of gods Poseidon, Sea God Apollo, God of Light, linked to Helios Dionysus, God of Wine and Fertility Hera, Wife of Zeus, Queen of gods Athene, Goddess of Wisdom and War Artemis, Virgin Huntress Demeter, Earth Mother, Goddess of Grain Aphrodite, Goddess of Love The Judgement of Paris This famous and intriguing story which is claimed to be the cause of the great Trojan War is found in Apollodorus and is also mentioned by Pausanias. When the dark beauty, Hecuba, the wife of King Priam, was pregnant, she had a terrifying dream. She dreamed she gave birth to a firebrand and awoke screaming that the city of Troy was burning to the ground. Alarmed by this, her husband consulted his son, the seer Aisacros, who told him the baby would one day cause the destruction of his country.

Accordingly Priam ordered that the child should be put to death. So, after the boy was born, he was given to the chief herdsman, Agelaus, to be killed. Agelaus left the child on Mount Ida to die from exposure but, returning five days later, found the boy still alive and took him home, where he brought him up secretly. As a young man, Paris became noted for his extreme beauty, wit and prowess. At about this time the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the hero and the sea-goddess, was celebrated on Mount Pelion. All the gods and goddesses were invited, with the noted exception of Eris, the Goddess of Strife, who was hideous and disagreeable. Angered at being left out of the nuptuals she strode into the middle of the wedding feast and threw a golden apple into the assembled company. It landed between the three most powerful goddesses, Hera, Athene and Aphrodite. Picking it up, Zeus found it was inscribed ‘For the Fairest’.

Wisely deciding not to judge between the three deities himself, Zeus nominated the beautiful Paris as arbiter, but first he sent Hermes to enquire whether he would be willing to act as judge. Paris agreed and so a time was set for the three goddesses to appear to him on Mount Ida. When the day came, Paris sat himself on a boulder and waited with beating heart for the arrival of the three great deities. All at once a great light appeared which covered the entire mountain. At first Paris was blinded, but then the goddesses cloaked their light in cloud so that he was able to look at them. First Hera, the great queen, approached him and flaunted her beauty in front of him. Radiant with glory she made him a promise. If he awarded her the apple, she would grant him wealth and power. He would rule over the greatest kingdom on earth. Paris felt the excitement of this and his ambition rose up and yearned for her gift. After that, grey-eyed Athene approached him, drawing near and bending down, so that he might look into the magical depths of her eyes. She promised him victory in all battles, together with glory and wisdom - the three most precious gifts a man could have.

This time Paris felt his mind leap with excitement and with desire for the riches of knowledge and the glory of prowess. Then it was the turn of Aphrodite. Hanging back a little, she tilted her head so that her hair fell forward, concealing a blush on her face. Then she loosened the girdle of her robe and beneath it, Paris caught sight of her perfectly formed breast, white as alabaster. ‘Paris,’ she said, and her voice seemed to sing inside his head. ‘Give me the apple and in return I will give you the gift of love. You will possess the most beautiful woman in the land, a woman equal to me in perfection of form. With her you will experience the greatest delights of love-making. Choose me, Paris, and she will be yours.’ Then Paris, overpowered by the intoxication of her words and her beauty, found himself handing her the apple without even pausing to reflect on his decision, guided only by the strength of his desire. So it was that Paris awarded the Apple of Discord to Aphrodite, and Hera and Athene became his implacable enemies.

True to her promise, Aphrodite gave him Helen, the most beautiful woman living on the earth at that time - but, in order to enjoy her, he had to snatch her from her powerful husband, Menelaus. So began the terrible ten-years’ war between the Trojans and the Greeks in which many a brave hero lost his life, including Paris himself, and after which the great hero Odysseus wandered the seas for a further ten long years before returning home. The Judgement of Paris, Hendrick van Balen. Paris holds the golden apple. Commentary This brief episode, which is to have such far-reaching consequences, begins on a suitably ominous note. Hecuba’s dream is reminiscent of other prophetic dreams and portents. As is usually the case, those involved take drastic steps to prevent the awful prophecy coming true. This is the case with the Celtic Deirdre, whose beauty causes similar strife, and Oedipus (see Chapter 4), who is exposed as an infant in a similar way to Paris. Like Oedipus, and other heroes, Paris grows up unaware of his true parentage.

Ironically he is even said to have unwittingly attended his own funeral games, finally held by his real parents for their ‘long-dead’ son! As in other cases, too, the gods ensure that mortals are unable to avoid their fate. Goddesses dishonoured The full extent to which humans are ruled by the gods only becomes clear when we learn that Aphrodite set up the contest, presumably knowing that she held the trump card. She did so in order to punish Tyndareus, husband of Leda, for dishonouring her. Pausanias relates that Tyndareus put fetters on Aphrodite’s statue in her temple, because he felt that her amorous powers should be confined to marriage. The outraged goddess decided to make all three of his daughters unfaithful to their husbands. The most famous daughter was Helen of Troy, although strictly speaking her father was probably Zeus, who seduced Leda in the form of a swan on a night when she also slept with her husband. The marriage at which the fateful apple is produced is unusual, being between a mortal man and a goddess.

The failure to invite Eris, Strife (echoed in the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty), represents a dishonouring comparable with Tyndareus’ treatment of Aphrodite. The implication is that even destructive deities are essential to the psyche and to society, and will make their presence felt if denied. Similarly, strife is a necessary part of marriage. Eris is associated with Ares, god of war, who in turn is amorously connected to Aphrodite. The beauty contest The contest which Eris initiates sets the three goddesses against each other. In myth, goddesses frequently appear in threes, representing aspects of a single deity. Thus, although Hera, Athene and Aphrodite represent quite different forces, the competition may reflect a time when they were less divided. Paris has a difficult choice. Hera, wife of Zeus, is the goddess of marriage and the home, and as such is always smarting from her husband’s sexual adventures. Athene is a virgin goddess of war and wisdom. Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual love, also associated with physical beauty in all its forms.

Yet her affairs with the war god Ares, and her engineering of the Trojan War (as well as lesser conflicts), suggest the close relationship between sexual love and conflict. The apple thrown by Eris is perhaps related to Eve’s apple, representing a Fall from unity to disunity. The contest itself resembles other mythical contests, especially that between three Celtic heroes, including Cuchulainn, over which of them is the greatest hero. Here the role played by Eris in the Greek myth is paralleled by the mischief-maker Bricriu. In another version of the story, Aphrodite cheats by revealing herself naked except for her magic girdle. Even in the version given here, it seems that the contest is unequal: Paris is overpowered and, contrary to the story’s usual title, is unable to exercise his judgement. We could see this as a metaphor for ‘falling in love’. In an even more intriguing version, found in Euripedes and Apollodorus, Hera, angry with Paris for choosing Aphrodite, creates a phantom Helen, whom he weds, while the real Helen is spirited away to Egypt by Hermes on the orders of Zeus.

This implies that Paris does not relate to the real woman, but to a phantasm of his own imagination. In Jungian terms she is the projection of his own anima. Helen of Troy [ ? ]Subscribe To This Site The Beautiful Helen of Troy - Biography In Greek mythology, Helen of Troy was considered the most beautiful woman on Earth (in fact she was not from Troy, but she dwelt there for a long time). There were several versions about her birth. In one of this versions, Helen of Troy's mother is Leda, the wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and her father is Zeus. He appeared as a swan to Leda, that's why she laid an egg, and the beautiful Helen was born from that egg. Another version makes her the daughter of Nemesis: trying to escape from Zeus, who would follow her everywhere, the goddess Nemesis took different shapes, and when she transformed into a goose, Zeus transformed into a swan - later the goddess laid an egg, that she abandoned in a forest. A shepherd found it and took it to Leda, who kept it safely until it opened.

When she saw the beauty of the little girl born from the egg, Leda brought her up as her own daughter. Helen of Troy had two brothers: Pollux (or Pollydeuces, who was Zeus' son too) and Castor, and a sister, Clytaemnestra - the last two were Tyndareus' children. When she was about ten, she was seen by Theseus and Piritous, who both fell in love with her. They cast lots and Theseus won, so he kidnapped her and took her to Aphidnae, where he entrusted her to his mother, Aethra. Helen of Troy's brothers, the Dioscuri, went after her, while Theseus and Piritous were gone to kidnap Persephone. Someone told them where Helen was hidden, and they took her back, together with Aethra (Theseus' mother), who became Helen of Troy's slave until the end of the war of Troy. During this adventure, some say that Theseus respected her, but others say she bore a daughter to him, Iphigenia (who was brought up by Helen's sister, Clytaemnestra, in order to help Helen maintain her reputation).

When Helen came back home, Tyndareus, her father, decided it was time to marry her. As word about her beauty had spread all over Hellas, all the kings, princes and heroes of Greece came and tried to win her hand. Her father was afraid that her choosing one of them over the others might lead to war, so he followed Ulysses' advice and made all of them take an oath to respect Helen's choice and to help her future husband, should something happen. So Helen chose Menelaus, who later became king of Sparta. At the wedding of Thetis and Peleus , all the gods were invited, except for Eris, the goddess of discord. That's why she decided to take revenge, and she threw in the middle of the goddesses a golden apple, on which it was written: "To the most beautiful". Hera, Athena and Aphrodite claimed the apple. Zeus didn't want to be trapped in this fight, so he decided it should be Paris to judge who was the most beautiful.

In order to get the apple, Hera promised to make him a powerful king, Athena promised to make him wise and undefeated and Aphrodite promised to give him as a wife the most beautiful woman on Earth, that is Helen. Paris didn't think twice (if you ask me, he didn't even think once) and he decided to give the apple to Aphrodite , who thus became the first "Miss Universe" (while Helen of Troy, being just a woman, would be "Miss World", right?). So Paris went to Sparta, where he was a guest at king Menelaus' court. When the king had to leave for Crateus' funeral, Helen had to take care of the guests. Paris managed to seduce Helen with his beauty and with rich gifts and took her away with him (smart woman, Helen of Troy - she also took a lot of her husband riches with her; but she left her daughter Hermione, so maybe she wasn't so smart after all). Some say she didn't agree to all this, others say it was her own father who gave her to Paris, others yet blame it on the gods' decisions - but it's quite probable that Helen was seduced by Paris' beauty AND richness.

When they arrived in Troy, Helen was received by Priamus and Hecabe, who were amazed by her beauty. Soon, Menelaus went to ask her back, but Paris refused, so the poor husband had no choice but to remind the other Greek kings about their oath. And that's how the war of Troy began - this also explains why the Trojans hated the beautiful Helen. During the war, Helen of Troy's behaviour wasn't very consistent. The Illiad says that she stood on the walls of the city, showing the trojans the Greek kings and telling them their names. When the Trojan horse was introduced into the city, Helen suspected what was inside, so she went near it and imitated the voices of the Greek warriors' wives. They had to make an enormous effort to keep silent. Other times, she would help the Greeks. When Ulysses entered Troy, disguised as a beggar, she recognized him, but said nothing, and later helped him steal the Palladium statue.

During the night in which Troy fell, she signalled with a torch from her room, for the Achaean ships (if you ask me, she did it because she realized the Greeks were about to win, so she wanted to be on the safe side). In the tenth year of war, Paris was killed, and Priamus decided to give Helen as a prize to the most valiant. Deiphobus won the contest (in which Helenus and Idomeneus also participated) and married Helen (wait a minute, didn't it count that she was already married?). The night Troy was conquered, Helen hid away all the weapons in Deiphobus' house, so as he couldn't defend himself. When Menelaus arrived, he killed Deiphobus and he wanted to kill Helen of Troy too - but it was enought for her to show him a naked shoulder, that he dropped the sword and forgave her. When the Greeks saw Helen arriving, safe and sound, they wanted to stone her to death - but her beauty made them drop the stones. The return trip of Menelaus and Helen (of Troy) to Sparta wasn't easy. They had to wander for eight long years before getting home.

Euripides says that Menelaus and Helen arrived in Argos the day when Orestes killed Clytaemnestra and Aegystus. When he saw Helen, Orestes wanted to kill her, too, as she was responsible for everything that had happened to his family. That's when Zeus sent Apollo to kidnap Helen and then he made her immortal (of course, after all the bad things she cause, she was made immortal - but what do you want, Zeus was her daddy). According to other traditions, she came back to Sparta with her husband and became a model wife (maybe she was just getting old and her beauty was not what it used to be). When Menelaus died, she was banned from Sparta by his sons, as a punishment to all the sorrow she had caused. She took refuge in Rhodes, where she had a friend, Polyxo. But Polyxo's husband, the king, had died in the war of Troy, so she decided to punish Helen for it - that's why she dressed her servants as erynies and sent them to frighten Helen when she was taking a bath - in the end, she was so scared, that she hanged herself.

Anyway, there is also a legend according to which Helen and Achilles, who had become immortal, too, got married and lived happily ever after on the White Island (Leuké), near the mouth of the river Danube. As you see, beauty is not always a gift, even if it helped Helen sometimes. The wise people of Troy couldn't really blame the war on her, as they considered it quite normal to fight for beauty. There are also others who say that Helen was not guilty at all, as it was not her who went to Troy, but a phantom, made by Hera (or Zeus) from a cloud. It is also probable that the legend of Helen of Troy was only meant to give a more poetical explanation for an otherwise "normal" war, that is a war for the riches of the city of Troy. But we would have been poorer without this poetical explanation...

Children: - (maybe) with Theseus: Iphigenia - with Menelaus: Hermione, Nicostratos (but some consider Nicostratus only Menelaus' son) - with Paris: Helen (a daughter who was killed by Hecuba), Idaeus and three other sons who were all killed by a roof that collapsed during the conquest of Troy. FAQs about Helen of Troy. If you want to see how Helen of Troy was represented in the movies, here is a short selection: - In this film, it's worth looking at Achilles (Brad Pitt), while the choice of Helen was a little bit discussed: In this film from 1956, most people agree Helen (the Italian actress Rossanna Podesta') is very sexy: And there is another film, called after Helen of Troy: Not exactly what you were looking for? Keep on searching! Custom Search Helen Of Troy (Greek Mythology) - Credo Reference Cite Image in Greek mythology, the most beautiful of women; daughter of Leda and Zeus , and sister of Castor and Pollux and Clytemnestra .

While still a young girl Helen was abducted to Attica by Theseus and Polydeuces, but Castor and Pollux rescued her. Later, when she was courted by the greatest heroes and chieftains of Greece, her foster father, Tyndareus, fearful of their jealousies, demanded that each suitor swear to defend the rights of the man Helen chose. She then married Menelaus , who, when Paris carried her off to Troy, reminded her former suitors of their oath. They then recruited an army and defeated the Trojans in the Trojan War . Some legends say that Paris forcibly abducted Helen; others that she fell in love with him and went willingly. In one peculiar account, originating in Stesichorus and used by Euripides, Helen was rescued by Proteus in Egypt, who substituted in her stead a phantom that sailed to Troy with Paris. Proteus then cared for Helen until Menelaus finally claimed her. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Helen becomes Paris' wife but is in sympathy with the Greeks. She is easily reconciled with Menelaus after the war, and they return to a peaceful life at Sparta. There are several other accounts of the story of Helen.

Some say that after she and Menelaus returned to Greece, Orestes vengefully tried to kill her but that Zeus deified her. She bore Menelaus one daughter, Hermione , and, by some accounts, a son, Pleisthenes. Helen had cults in Sparta and elsewhere and is considered by some scholars to be a "faded" goddess—perhaps an ancient fertility goddess—who became a mortal woman. The Columbia Encyclopedia, © Columbia University Press 2016 Related Topics In Greek mythology, an immortalized hero (Roman Hercules); son of Zeus and Alcmene; and famed for his strength. While serving... More relevant topics Helen Helen See More Helen Pictures > Helen or Helen of Troy was the daughter of Zeus and Leda in Greek mythology, although her putative father was Tyndareus . A twin sister of Clytemnestra , she also had the twin brothers Castor and Pollux , also known as the Dioscuri . She was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the known world. Initially she was abducted by the hero Theseus , who left her in the protection of his mother Aethra while he was away adventuring.

During that time, Athens was invaded by the Spartan army led by Castor and Pollux , taking Helen back and capturing Aethra instead. Later, a number of suitors tried to win her hand, eventually Menelaus being the victor. All suitors, though, were bound by an oath to assist, in case Helen would be abducted in the future. Her marriage to Menelaus , king of Sparta , saw her ascend to the throne of the city as a queen. They had a daughter, Hermione , and three sons, Aethiolas, Maraphius and Pleisthenes . The marriage of Helen and Menelaus marked the beginning of the end for the age of heroes , which was Zeus ' decision and was brought upon with the culmination of events to the Trojan War . Paris , the prince of Troy , was visiting Sparta for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis , the ceremony being organised by Zeus himself. However, Eris , the goddess of discord was not invited, angering her. Thus, she dropped a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides on which the words "To the fairest" were engraved.

Hera , Athena and Aphrodite claimed to be the fairest of all, and demanded the apple. Zeus , trying to calm them, asked Paris to make a judgment. The goddesses offered the young prince various gifts, and Paris eventually chose Aphrodite , who had told him she would give him the most beautiful woman in the world. Hence, Helen was abducted by Paris and brought to Troy . Other accounts say that she went there by her own accord, and that she and Paris had eloped. When Menelaus realised what had happened, he asked all the suitors to help him bring his wife back, as they had sworn initially. This is how the Trojan War started. In some accounts, Helen was thought to prosper in the city of Troy and be a treacherous woman, but in other stories, she was considered to be in constant gloom and sorrow. There are also different stories about her fate. After she returned to Sparta , Menelaus tried to kill her for her treachery, however she disrobed and her beauty weakened Menelaus and made him drop his sword.

In another version, she was thought to have gone to Mount Olympus , while yet a different account says she eventually went to the Underworld to spend eternity with Achilles . Helen Is also called Helen of Troy, Helen of Sparta. Helen of Troy, Greece, Greek mythology Greek Mythology Zethos Helen The most beautiful woman in Greece who was best known for being the cause of the Trojan War. She was half divine: her father was Zeus and her mother Leda , who had been seduced by the god in the shape of a swan. Her cousin was Penelope , Odysseus's wife, her brothers the famous twins Castor and Polydeuces (lat. Pollux) and her sisters Clytemnestra and Timandra . Because her stepfather Tyndareus had neglected making sacrifices to Aphrodite, the three sisters had been cursed to all become adulteresses. According to another version it was Nemesis who was seduced by Zeus in the shape of a swan. The eggs were then taken to Leda to look after. The reason Helen was conceived was that Zeus wanted to kill off a part of humanity since he thought Earth was overpopulated; thus Helen would be his tool.

Helen was beautiful already as a child, and the hero Theseus had kidnapped her at one point, so that she would be his wife one day. Her twin brothers came to her rescue and brought her back to their mother. When the time came for her to marry, many men courted her, amongst them Odysseus. The latter made all the men promise to respect her decision and to protect whomever she chose. Finally she chose Menelaos , king of Sparta and brother of the mightiest king of Greece: Agamemnon . Aphrodite promised her to prince Paris of Troy as a bribe when he was forced to decide who was the most beautiful goddess. By then Helen was already married to Menelaus and when the couple were visited by Paris, they treated him with great hospitality. Aphrodite made Helen fall for Paris, and together the lovers eloped to Troy. On discovering what had happened, Menelaus asked his brother to summon the Greek kings and heroes to go to war against Troy. Menelaos eventually got Helen back, and after a difficult journey, taking them to places like Cyprus and Egypt, they went back to Sparta, had a daughter, Hermione, and lived happily ever after.

According to a later version, Helen had been in Egypt all along and the woman in Troy was only a ghost copy of her. Greek Gods Troy - Ancient History Encyclopedia Troy by Mark Cartwright published on 02 August 2012 Troy is the name of the Bronze Age city featured in the Trojan War of ancient Greek oral and literary tradition and the name given to the archaeological site in the north west of Asia Minor (now Turkey ) which has revealed a large and prosperous city occupied over millennia. There has been much scholarly debate as to whether mythical Troy actually existed and if so whether the archaeological site was the same city; however, it is now almost universally accepted that the archaeological excavations have revealed the city of Homer ’s Iliad. Other names for Troy include Hisarlik (Turkish), Ilios (Homer), Ilion (Greek) and Ilium ( Roman ). Mythological Troy Troy is the setting for Homer’s Iliad in which he recounts the final year of the Trojan War sometime in the 13th century BCE. The war was in fact a ten-year siege of the city by a coalition of Greek forces led by King Agamemnon of Mycenae .

The purpose of the expedition was to reclaim Helen , wife of Menelaos, king of Argos and brother of Agamemnon. Helen was abducted by the Trojan prince Paris and taken as his prize for choosing Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess in a competition with Athena and Hera . The Trojan War is also told in other sources such as the Epic Cycle poems (of which only fragments survive) and is also briefly mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. Troy and the Trojan War later became a staple myth of Classical Greek and Roman literature . Remove Ads Advertisement Homer describes Troy as ‘well-founded’, ‘strong-built’ and ‘well-walled’; there are also several references to fine battlements, towers and ‘high’ and ‘steep’ walls. The walls must have been unusually strong in order to withstand a ten-year siege and in fact, Troy fell through the trickery of the Trojan horse ruse rather than any defensive failing. Indeed, in Greek mythology the walls were so impressive that they were said to have been built by Poseidon and Apollo who after an act of impiety were compelled by Zeus to serve the Trojan king Laomedon for one year.

However, the fortifications did not help the king when Herakles sacked the city with an expedition of only six ships. The sacking was Herakles’ revenge for not being paid for his services to the king when he killed the sea-serpent sent by Poseidon. This episode was traditionally placed one generation before the Trojan War as the only male survivor was Laomedon’s youngest son Priam, the Trojan king in the later conflict. The Archaeological Site of Troy Inhabited from the Early Bronze Age (3000 BCE) through to the 12th century CE the archaeological site which is now called Troy is 5 km from the coast but was once next to the sea. The site was situated in a bay created by the mouth of the river Skamanda and occupied a strategically important position between Aegean and Eastern civilizations by controlling the principal point of access to the Black Sea, Anatolia and the Balkans from both directions by land and sea. In particular, the difficulty in finding favourable winds to enter the Dardanelles may well have resulted in ancient sailing vessels standing by near Troy.

Consequently, the site became the most important Bronze Age city in the North Aegean, reaching the height of its prosperity in the middle Bronze Age, contemporary with the Mycenaean civilization on the Greek mainland and the Hittite empire to the East. Excavations revealed 9 different cities and 46 levels of habitation. Troy was first excavated by Frank Calvert in 1863 CE and visited by Heinrich Schliemann who continued excavations from 1870 CE until his death in 1890 CE; in particular, he attacked the conspicuous 20 m high artificial mound which had been left untouched since antiquity. Initial finds by Schliemann of gold and silver jewellery and vessels seemed to vindicate his belief that the site was actually the Troy of Homer. However, these have now been dated to more than a thousand years before a probable date for the Trojan War and indicated that the history of the site was much more complex than previously considered. Indeed, perhaps unwittingly, Schliemann would add 2000 years to Western history, which had previously gone back only as far as the first Olympiad of 776 BCE.

Remove Ads Advertisement The excavations continued throughout the 20th century CE and continue to the present day and they have revealed nine different cities and no less than 46 levels of inhabitation at the site. These have been labelled Troy I to Troy IX after Schliemann’s (and his successor Dorpfeld’s) original classification. This has since been slightly adjusted to incorporate radio-carbon dating results from the early 21st century CE. Troy I (c. 3000-2550 BCE) was a small village settlement surrounded by stone walls. Pottery and metal finds match those on Lesbos and Lemnos in the Aegean and in northern Anatolia. Troy II (c. 2550-2300 BCE) displays larger buildings (40 m long), mud-brick and stone fortifications with monumental gates. Schliemann’s ‘treasure’ finds - objects in gold, silver, electrum, bronze, carnelian and lapis lazuli - most likely come from this period. This ‘treasure’ includes 60 earrings, six bracelets, two magnificent diadems and 8750 rings, all in solid gold.

Once again, finds of foreign materials suggest trade with Asia. Remove Ads Advertisement Troy III - Troy V (c. 2300-1750 BCE) is the most difficult period to reconstruct as the layers were hastily removed in early excavations in order to reach the lower levels. Generally speaking, the period seems a less prosperous one but foreign contact is further evidenced by the presence of Anatolian influenced dome ovens and Minoan pottery. Troy VI (c. 1750-1300 BCE) is the period most visible today at the site and is the most likely candidate for the besieged city of Homer’s Trojan War. Impressive fortification walls 5 m thick and up to 8 m high constructed from large limestone blocks and including several towers (with the rectangular plan as in Hittite fortifications) demonstrate the prosperity but also concern for defence during this period. The walls would have once been topped by a mud brick and wood superstructure and with closely fitting stonework sloping inwards; as the walls rise they certainly fit the Homeric description of ‘strong-built Troy’.

In addition, sections of the walls are slightly offset every 10 m or so in order to curve around the site without the necessity for corners (a weak point in wall defence). This feature is unique to Troy and displays an independence from both Mycenaean and Hittite influence. The walls included five gateways allowing entrance to the inner city composed of large structures, once of two stories and with central courts and colonnaded halls similar to those of contemporary Mycenaean cities such as Tiryns , Pylos and Mycenae itself. Outside the fortified citadel the lower town covers an impressive 270,000 square metres protected by an encircling rock-cut ditch. The size of the site is now much bigger than first thought when Schliemann excavated and suggests a population of as high as 10,000, much more in keeping with Homer’s grand city-state . Finds at the site point to the existence of a thriving wool industry and the first use of horses, recalling Homer’s oft used epithet ‘horse-taming Trojans’. Pottery very similar to that on the Greek mainland has been discovered, principally the Grey Minyan ware which imitates metal vessels.

There are also imported ceramics from Crete , Cyprus and the Levant . In marked contrast to Mycenaean palaces, there is no evidence of sculpture or fresco-painted walls. Troy VI was partially destroyed but the exact cause is not known beyond some evidence of fire. Intriguingly, bronze arrow heads, spear tips and sling shots have been found on the site and even some embedded in the fortification walls, suggesting some sort of conflict. The dates of these (c. 1250 BCE) and the site destruction correlate with Herodotus ’ dates for the Trojan War. Conflicts over the centuries between Mycenaeans and Hittites are more than probable and may well have been the origin of the epic Trojan War in Greek mythology . There is very little evidence of any large-scale war but the possibility of smaller conflicts is evidenced in Hittite texts where ‘Ahhiyawa’ is recognised as referring to Mycenaean Greeks and ‘Wilusa’ as the region of which Ilios was the capital. These documents tell of local unrest and Mycenaean support of local rebellion against Hittite control in the area of Troy and suggest a possible motive for regional rivalry between the two civilizations.

Intriguingly, there is also a bronze Mycenaean sword taken as war booty and found in Hattusa, the Hittite capital. Troy VIIa (c. 1300-1180 BCE) and Troy VIIb (c. 1180-950 BCE) both display an increase in the size of the lower town and some reconstruction of the fortifications but also a marked decline in architectural and artistic quality in respect to Troy VI. For example, there is a return to handmade pottery after centuries of wares made on the wheel. Once again, this correlates well with the Greek tradition that following the Trojan War the city was sacked and abandoned, at least for a time. Both Troy VIIa and Troy VIIb were destroyed by fires. Troy VIII and Troy IX (c. 950 BCE to 550 CE) are the sites of Greek Ilion and Roman Ilium respectively. There is evidence that the site was populated throughout the so-called Dark Ages but the settlement did not return to a level of significant development until the 8th century BCE. Ancient Troy was never forgotten though.

The Persian King Xerxes is said by Herodotus to have sacrificed over a thousand oxen at the site prior to his invasion of Greece and Alexander the Great also visited the site before his expedition in the opposite direction in order to conquer Asia. A Doric temple to Athena was constructed in the early 3rd century BCE along with new fortifications under Lysimachos (c. 301-280 BCE). The Romans also held Troy in high regard and even referred to the city as ‘Sacred Ilium’. In Roman tradition, the Trojan hero Aeneas, son of Venus , had fled Troy and settled in Italy thus giving the Romans a divine ancestry. Julius Caesar in 48 BCE and Emperor Augustus (reign 27 BCE -14 CE) rebuilt much of the city and Hadrian (reign 117-138 CE) also added buildings which included an odeion, gymnasium and baths. Emperor Constantine (reign 324-337 CE) even planned to build his new capital at Troy and some construction work began until Constantinople was chosen instead.

Over time the site declined, most probably because the harbour had silted up and the once great city of Troy was finally abandoned, not to be rediscovered for another 1500 years. About the Author

Question: In Greek myth, who was the husband of Helen of Troy?
Answer: Menelaus