Explore "Helen" by Euripides on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
First produced in 412 BC for the Dionysia in a trilogy that also contained Euripides' lost Andromeda, this drama was written immediately following the Sicilian Expedition in which Athens had suffered a huge defeat. At the same time sophism was beginning to question traditional values and religious beliefs, causing much unrest in Athens.
About thirty years before this play, Herodotus argued in his Histories that the fabled Helen had never in fact arrived at Troy, but was in Egypt during the entire Trojan War. Euripides' drama Helen tells a variation of this story, beginning under the premise that rather than running off to Troy with Paris, Helen was actually taken away to Egypt by the gods. The Helen who escaped with Paris, betraying her husband and her country and initiating the ten-year conflict, was actually a phantom double of Helen. After Paris was promised the most beautiful woman in the world by Aphrodite and he judged her fairer than her fellow goddesses Athena and Hera, Hera ordered Hermes to replace Helen, Paris' assumed prize, with a counterfeit. Therefore, the real Helen has been languishing in Egypt for years, while the Greeks and Trojans alike curse her for her supposed infidelity.