Helen

Hatched, the poets said, from Leda’s egg, most beautiful of mortal women, Helen was courted by every prince of Greece — whence the oath of the suitors that bound them all to recover her. Whether she fled with Paris or was taken, whether (as Stesichorus and Euripides imagined) only a phantom ever went to Troy, the poets never settled. In the Iliad she weaves the war into cloth and names the heroes from the wall; in the Odyssey she is queen in Sparta again, dosing the wine with Egyptian forgetfulness.