Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy was the daughter of Zeus. She married the Spartan King, Menelaus, then eloped with the charismatic young Paris – the son of the King of Troy. Paris famously gave Aphrodite a golden apple inscribed with the words ‘To the fairest’. The Goddess of Love was so moved by this charming gesture, she rashly promised Paris the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world.

That woman was Helen and her hand had already been taken by Menelaus of Sparta. That didn’t stop Paris seducing Helen and eloping with her back to Troy. When King Menelaus returned from some skirmish at the frontier, he was hysterical. As you would be. He raised an army and launched a thousand ships that sailed across the Aegean to win back Helen, the first act of the Trojan War.

Helen thus earned the sobriquet the face that launched a thousand ships, the personification of great beauty – and this great beauty led to the deaths of many thousands, Trojans and Spartans alike.

It was during the Trojan War that Achilles was killed by an arrow that pierced his heel, his one vulnerable point (we still use Achilles’ heel to represent weakness), and who was the archer? Ironically, it was Paris the Seducer. From the writings of Homer, we still use his phrase: beware of Greeks baring gifts in honor of the wily Greeks feigning a retreat after leaving a giant wooden horse as a gift to the Trojans. At nightfall, while the war weary people of Troy were sleeping, the Greeks burst from the innards of the wooden horse and conquered the city.

The war came to an end and Homer recorded the tales in the Iliad. Helen had come to realize that Paris was as cowardly as he was charismatic; the two often go together. She sailed back to Sparta, but King Menelaus had seen too much suffering on the battlefield to see beauty in the face of Helen and both died prematurely.

If the story has a moral, it is beware of charismatic men, they are not what they seem; and beware of those women like Helen of Troy who drive men to war. No beauty is worth it.