A Helen who has always been faithful to her husband Menelaus; who never went to Troy, but was carried off to Egypt, where she remains throughout the Trojan War; who is falsely blamed for destruction in which she had no part, or rather a part in name only-this is the paradoxical heroine of Euripides’ Helen. The story is not his invention: Helen’s association with Egypt goes back at least to the Odyssey, and the idea that a divinely fashioned counterfeit went to Troy in her place can be traced back to a poem or poems of Stesichorus, a century and a half before Euripides’ play was performed in 412 BC. We can only speculate about Stesichorus’ treatment of the myth of the two Helens, but to Euripides the idea of an image designed to deceive by the gods themselves suggested a world in which nothing is precisely what it seems to be, in which appearance and reality are all too easily confused. Helen plays with this premise in ways that make it by turns amusing and disturbing, playful and full of serious quandaries. The real Helen did not commit the deeds for which she is famous, and yet she cannot escape a reputation based on what the world believes her to be, rather than on what she is. Menelaus seems far less than the hero of Troy he vaunts himself to be, not least because the Trojan War now appears, as almost everyone in the play remarks, to have been fought over nothing at all. And yet, with the disappearance of the phantom Helen, Menelaus does reclaim his wife at last and the real Helen plots a brilliant deception that will bring them both home again in triumph. Helen is an extraordinary performance that has disturbed critics because it refuses to conform to their expectations of its genre, appearing to many to be a philosophical divertissement or a romantic comedy rather than a tragedy. And yet an Athenian tragedy it surely was, despite its foreshadowings of comedy to come. At its heart is Helen herself, her beautiful body betrayed by her ugly name (to use the soma/onoma antithesis deployed so often in the play), unable at first to convince anyone, even her husband, that she is not her image, but finally, through long struggle, able to make herself whole.
