HELEN

the wife of Menelaus in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Her abduction by Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, leads to the Trojan War. Helen, though beautiful in appearance, is a shallow and insipid woman, unworthy of representing the ideal of beauty. Shakespeare's ironic and cynical portrayal of Helen serves to emphasize the emptiness and stupidity of the warring societies. 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. She was also the sister of Clytemnestra, who married Agamemnon, and wife of 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 Dephobus, whom she betrayed to Menelaus when Troy was subsequently captured. Menelaus and she then returned to Sparta, where they lived happily until their deaths. According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes, whose queen, Polyxo, hanged her in revenge for the loss 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 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.