HELEN, in Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus by Leda (wife of Tyndareus, King of Sparta) or by Nemesis : sister of Polydeu ces and Clytaemnestra, and wife of Menelaus (Gr. 'EMIT ). She was the most beautiful woman in Greece, and indirectly the cause of the Trojan war. When a child she was carried off from Sparta by Theseus to Attica, but was recovered and taken back by her brothers. When she grew up, the most famous of the princes of Greece sought her hand in marriage and her father's choice fell upon Menelaus. During her husband's absence she was induced by Paris, son of Priam, with the connivance of Aphrodite, to flee with him to Troy. After the death of Paris she married his brother Deiphobus, whom she is said to have betrayed into the hands of Menelaus at the capture of the city (Aeneid vi. 517ff). Menelaus thereupon took her back, and they returned together to Sparta, where they lived happily till their death and were buried at Ther apnae in Laconia. According to another story, Helen survived her husband, and was driven out by her stepsons. She fled to Rhodes, where she was hanged on a tree by her former friend Polyxo, to avenge the loss of her husband Tlepolemus in the Trojan War (Pausanias iii. 19). After death, Helen was said to have married Achilles in his home in the island of Leuke. According to Stesi chorus, Paris, on his voyage to Troy with Helen, was driven ashore on the coast of Egypt, where King Proteus detained the real Helen in Egypt, while a phantom Helen was carried off to Troy; the real one was recovered by her husband after the war. (Herodotus ii. 112-120; Euripides, Helena). Helen was worshipped as the god dess of beauty at Therapnae in Laconia, where a festival was held in her honour. At Rhodes she was worshipped under the name of Dendritis (the tree goddess), where the inhabitants built a temple in her honour. We have thus an epic heroine Helen and a goddess Helen ; the relations between the two are a problem as yet un solved. Like her brothers, the Dioscuri, she was a patron deity of sailors.
See R. Englemann in Roscher's Lexikon; O. Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie, i. 163.