In Search of the Real Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy painting by Rossetti

She was 'the face that launched a thousand ships' and the woman blamed for starting a conflict that caused countless deaths. But, behind all the legend who was the real woman we know as Helen of Troy?

Today on Far Future Horizons we join Bettany Hughes on a voyage through time to the dawn of classical antiquity in search of the woman responsible for sparking one of the greatest conflicts in history – the Trojan War.

Bettany Hughes travels across the eastern Mediterranean to disentangle myth from reality and find the truth about the most beautiful woman on earth.

Theseus pursuing a woman, probably Helen. Side A from an Attic red-figure bell-krater, c. 440–430 BC (Louvre, Paris).

Helen's story is a dark and very human drama, interweaving pleasure and pain, sex and violence, love and hate: a tale that started with a messy love affair and  ended with a bloody and disastrous conflict.

In this painting by Maarten van Heemskerck Helen, queen of the Greek city-state Sparta, is abducted by Paris, a prince of Troy in Asian Minor. The Walters Art Museum.

Hughes argues that many images of the mythic Helen, from Hollywood movies to romantic paintings, have got her all wrong: Helen was the original sex goddess. And the film reveals just how a pre-historic princess in Bronze Age Greece -- a real Helen -- would have looked. The feature-length documentary takes in some of the most beautiful scenery of the ancient world, from the magnificent citadel at Mycenae and the spectacular shrine to Helen in Sparta, to the archaeological site in modern Turkey that will be forever linked with the war fought in Helen's name: Troy.

 

Bettany Hughes also wrote Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore available from Amazon Books in the United States and the United Kingdom.

As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for close on three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek King Menelaus and the Trojan Prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. For millennia she has been viewed as an exquisite agent of extermination. But who was she?

 Helen exists in many guises: a matriarch from the Age of Heroes who ruled over one of the most fertile areas of the Mycenaean world; Helen of Sparta, the focus of a cult which conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess; the home-wrecker of the Iliad; the bitch-whore of Greek tragedy; the pin-up of Romantic artists.

 Focusing on the 'real' Helen - a flesh-and-blood aristocrat from the Greek Bronze Age - acclaimed historian Bettany Hughes reconstructs the context of life for this elusive pre-historic princess. Through the eyes of a young Mycenaean woman, Hughes examines the physical, historical and cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor. Vivid and compelling, this remarkable book brilliantly unpacks the facts and myths surrounding one of the most enigmatic and notorious figures of all time.

In Search of the Real Helen of Troy
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