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 & a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek King Menelaus & the Trojan Prince Paris Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East & 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-&-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 & cultural traces that Helen has left on locations in Greece North Africa & Asia Minor. Vivid & compelling this remarkable book brilliantly unpacks the facts & myths surrounding one of the most enigmatic & notorious figures of all time.