About thirty years before this play,
Herodotus argued in his
Histories that Helen had never in fact arrived at Troy, but was in Egypt during the entire Trojan War. The Archaic lyric poet
Stesichorus had made the same assertion in his "Palinode" (itself a correction to an earlier poem corroborating the traditional characterization that made Helen out to be a woman of ill repute). The play
Helen tells a variant of this story, beginning under the premise that rather than running off to
Troy with
Paris, Helen was actually whisked 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 an
eidolon, a phantom look-alike. 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 fake. Thus, the real Helen has been languishing in Egypt for years, while the Greeks and Trojans alike curse her for her supposed
infidelity. In Egypt, king
Proteus, who had protected Helen, has died. His son
Theoclymenus, the new king with a penchant for killing Greeks, intends to marry Helen, who after all these years remains loyal to her husband Menelaus. ==Plot==