Helen, the beautiful daughter of Zeus and the mortal woman Leda, was the cause of the Trojan war, according to the version of the myth presupposed by the Iliad and most later versions. The Trojan Paris, who judged Aphrodite the fairest of the goddesses competing for the title, was not an impartial judge, for Aphrodite had bribed him with the promise that she would reward him with the most beautiful of all mortal women. Since Helen was already the wife to the Greek Menelaus, the result was war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Ultimately Paris was killed, the Greeks won the war and Menelaus took Helen away with him back to Sparta, though they only reached home after lengthy wanderings. According to the fourth book of the Odyssey, those wanderings did involve journeyings almost as far as Egypt, and Menelaus had to consult Proteus, the old man of the sea, in order to find his way home again.
This is the familiar version, the version which with some variations is central to the Greek tradition. Among the variables is Helen’s own personality: she could be presented as a victim of Aphrodite, constantly regretting her fate (as in the Iliad), or as a shallow, vain adulteress (as in Euripides’ own Trojan Women). But a different tradition is attested in the poetry (now lost) of Stesichorus, a lyric poet of the sixth century BC. In a famous passage which survives in later quotations, Stesichorus addressed Helen saying, ‘It is not true, the tale. You did not go in the well-benched ships; you did not come to Pergama of Troy.’ According to these later sources, Stesichorus is the source from whom Euripides drew the tale that a phantom went to Troy in Helen’s place. The historian Herodotus also discusses Helen, from the point of view of a sceptic who is reluctant to accept that a ten-year war was fought and a city destroyed for the sake of a woman. According to his account, Helen was detained in Egypt and the Trojans had no choice but to fight on, for they could not return the woman when the Greeks demanded her (Herodotus 2.112–20). This is a rationalizing version, eliminating the phantom but retaining the notion that Helen in fact did not go to Troy.
Euripides had alluded to the alternative tradition in passing, near the end of his Electra (1280–83), which is probably a few years earlier than Helen. In this play he adopts it whole-heartedly, and takes obvious pleasure in developing the paradoxes of the situation, as when Menelaus ponders in bewilderment whether there can be a man called Zeus in Egypt who could be father to a different Helen (483ff). There are advantages of characterization: Helen makes a more intriguing central figure if she is no simple adulteress but a woman fraught with undeserved guilt and undesired responsibility for the futile war. Euripides had put Helen on stage before, but only in minor roles; here she is central, but a misunderstood and virtuous woman. There are advantages in the unfolding of the plot: before Helen and Menelaus can be reunited, he has to be freed from his delusion and induced to recognize her for who she really is. There is ingenious new use of familiar plot-motifs: the story of the woman imprisoned in a foreign land, longing for rescue but unable to return to Greece or to send a message there, closely resembles the plot of Iphigenia among the Taurians. Other elements of the play are also part of Euripides’ stock in trade: the suppliant’s refuge, the recognition duet, the plot to escape, the naïve barbarian. Helen shows a remarkable self-consciousness in its bold redeployment of literary devices which were already well known as typically Euripidean. It is not surprising that Aristophanes took the opportunity the following year to parody the play mercilessly in his own Women at the Thesmophoria. The Euripidean drama had already gone some way towards parodying a ‘typical’ Euripidean escape-plot: did Aristophanes feel that tragedy was beginning to poach on comedy’s territory?
The alternative tradition raises worrying questions which may feed back into reflection on the more orthodox mythology of the war, and indeed on contemporary life. ‘Then we sweated away for no reason to win a phantom?’ asks Menelaus’ subordinate in aggrieved incredulity at line 705 of this play. Why did the Greeks fight the Trojan war? What did they gain in the end? What indeed are the Greeks fighting for centuries later, in the Peloponnesian war which was still in progress when Helen was produced? These questions are implicit in the play, sometimes aired explicitly. They are not explored with the intensity that might have been expected, in this genre or from the poet of the Trojan Women; rather, they are presented through a witty and ingenious, innovative plot which charms and entertains the audience without entirely obscuring the darker implications of the dramatic situation.
Helen has often puzzled modern audiences and critics, poised as it is between the serious and the comical. Some have sought to solve the critical issue by labels: melodrama, tragi-comedy, escapist drama. But although Helen undoubtedly has many humorous touches (not least the confrontation of the self-important Menelaus, dressed in rags, with the bad-tempered door-keeper who sends him packing), it would be an unsatisfying reading that excluded the play’s more serious aspects. Absurd the premises of the play may be, but it remains the case that many men have died and a whole society has been wiped out for no good reason; the discovery of the truth about the phantom cannot restore Teucer’s brother or Helen’s mother. The glamour of the war is reduced: Menelaus seems ridiculous in his boastfulness about his achievements on the Trojan plain. When the chorus, near the end of the play, lament the folly of warfare in general, this is suited to their character and situation, but it is difficult not to suppose that these lines spoke powerfully to a war-wearied generation (1151–64). Different members of the Athenian audience might enjoy the play as a delightful entertainment which offered a welcome distraction from their troubles, or they might ponder the serious point that seems to be hinted at in the myth of the phantom Helen – that all such goals are illusion, and that the profits of human ambition dissolve when gained. Euripides allows them, and us, to stress whichever side we find more congenial.