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determine her will, as they scratched lewd graffiti about her onto the walls of Rome, as they listened to politicians and philosophers enveloping her in their rhetoric, as they decorated their palaces and their temples with her image.
    Helen’s admirers (and her detractors) have been many and various. Medieval nuns pored over an imagined exchange of love-letters between Helen and Paris from the
Heroides
, written by Ovid – honing their own skills in literary flirtation as versions of the poems were smuggled out to men, or even passed between the girls in the convent. 30 In Renaissance England the rebellious named their daughters ‘Helen’ despite its categorisation by pamphleteers as an appellation that would bring disgrace. 31 In 17th-century Europe artists were commissioned to decorate buildings with giant scenes of Helen’s abduction. One example, by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, still survives in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A horribly compelling composition, it soars on the ceiling of the Galerie Mazarine. In the neo-classical boom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries men such as the philosopher, historian and dramatist Friedrich Schiller used the name ‘Helen’ as a term of abuse, to mean a flirt, a tart, an immoral woman. 32 Strolling through the Montmartre district of Paris in the 1860s you would have rubbed shoulders with a bohemian throng and an occasional royal, the Prince of Wales or the Tsar of Russia – all heading to the Théâtre de Variétés to watch Offenbach’s operetta sensation,
La Belle Hélène
. 33
    Dreamy 19th-century paintings portrayed Helen – anachronistically – as a plump, blonde, classical Greek beauty, dressed in diaphanous clothes. Scores of prostitutes found themselves plucked off the streets to be immortalisedin oils, as ‘Sweet Helena’. The Spartan queen has spawned some of the most beautiful poetry of the 20th century, and some of its ugliest. There are sites on the internet that today invoke her as a powerful white witch, others that hail her as the first recorded female role-model. Helen encourages speculation in its truest sense – holding a speculum, a mirror, up to her ever-changing face to see what worlds can be glimpsed in the reflection behind.
Goddess, Princess, Whore

    There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desirable, that calls either for art or for character.
    J.-W. Goethe (from posthumous papers) 34
    H ISTORY IS AT ONCE BAFFLED AND ENRAPTURED BY HELEN ; we can trace nearly three millennia of ambiguous attitudes towards her. She is difficult to categorise for good reason; a pursuit of Helen across the ages throws up three distinct, yet intertwined, guises. When we talk about her, we are in fact describing a trinity.
    The most familiar Helen is the brilliant regal beauty from the epics, particularly Homer’s Helen: the Spartan princess with divine paternity fought over by the heroes in Greece and then won by Menelaus’ wealth. The queen who – led on by the goddess of love, Aphrodite – welcomed a Trojan prince into her bed while her husband was overseas. The head-strong, capricious aristocrat who deserted the Greeks, sailed across the Aegean and then languished in Troy, hated by all around her. The exile who watched heroes suffer agonies in her name – fleet-footed Achilles, red-haired Menelaus, sharp-witted Odysseus, Agamemnon, the king of men; and of course the lads from the eastern camp – Hector, breaker of horses, Priam, lord of a glorious citadel, and Paris with his glistening love-locks.
    This is the invidious Helen who walked around the Trojan Horse, imitating the voices of the Greek wives, attempting to dislodge her erstwhilecountrymen from their equine siege-breaker. The adulteress who, after ten sad, punishing, faithless years in Troy, was still so entrancing that her cuckold husband, Menelaus, could