What Did Helen of Troy Look Like?

Many people over the years have wondered what Helen of Troy might have looked like. After all, she was supposedly “the face that launched a thousand ships.” Who wouldn’t want to see what that face looked like? The truth, however, is that Helen of Troy never really existed and she can look however you imagine her to have looked. Nonetheless, in this article, I intend to briefly examine how various ancient Greek and Roman authors describe Helen’s appearance and how she is portrayed in ancient Greek and Roman art.

The imaginary Helen

Helen of Troy almost certainly never existed as a historical figure. The Iliad and the Odyssey were probably mostly composed during the early seventh century BC, but the events they describe are set in the twelfth century BC, roughly five hundred years earlier. We have solid archaeological evidence that Troy was indeed a real city, but nothing to support the historicity of the Trojan War as the Homeric poems describe it, nor do we have any evidence to support the existence of any of the individual characters in the poems.

Furthermore, the idea of an actual ten-year-long siege of Troy is extraordinarily implausible, given late Bronze Age styles of warfare. It is more likely that the “Trojan War,” if it really happened at all, is a distant memory of a series of largely unorganized Mycenaean raiding expeditions against Troy and its various allies that may have perhaps ultimately culminated in the city itself being sacked.

Even that, however, is extremely speculative and it is entirely possible that the city of Troy may have simply been destroyed in the Late Bronze Age collapse that also destroyed the Mycenaean kingdoms only shortly thereafter. (For more information about why the Homeric poems are probably mostly fiction, I suggest reading this article I published on the subject in March 2019.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruined walls of Troy. Troy was a real city, but that does not mean the Trojan War really happened as described in Greek mythology.

The characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey and in later Greek legends about the war are all almost certainly fictional, including Helen. The whole backstory of the war being triggered by Paris’s abduction of Helen is historically implausible. Historically speaking, it makes no sense why all the armies of all the kingdoms of Greece would need to be assembled just to recapture one woman.

It also makes no historical sense why the Trojans did not simply give Helen back to Menelaos to save their city, a massive plot hole which was observed by none other than the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) in Book Two of his book The Histories, which was probably written in around the late 430s BC. Clearly, the whole story of the abduction of Helen is a literary contrivance; it did not really happen.

Furthermore, there have been some interesting arguments that Helen may be a historicized solar goddess, based on the possibility that her name may be related to the Greek word ἥλιος (hḗlios), meaning “sun,” and the fact that many of her personal attributes can be linked with those of different solar goddesses across a variety of other Indo-European mythologies.

Because Helen is a fictional character, every ancient writer imagined Helen differently. If you really want to know what Helen of Troy looked like, the answer is that she looked however you personally imagine her to have looked because she is a fictional character and you can imagine her however you want. Nonetheless, it is interesting to explore how Helen is described in Greek and Roman texts and how she is portrayed in Greek and Roman art.

Helen in the Homeric poems

The Iliad and the Odyssey give us almost no description whatsoever of Helen’s physical appearance. They do refer to Helen as “white-armed” (λευκώλενος; leukṓlenos), “long-dressed” (τανύπεπλος; tanýpeplos), and “lovely-haired” (καλλίκομος; kallíkomos), but none of these epithets are particularly descriptive.

Furthermore, all three epithets I have just mentioned are generic, stock epithets that are intended to show Helen’s high status. Her arms are white because she does not have to work, meaning she can stay indoors out of the sun; she wears a long dress because she can afford one; and she has lovely hair because she can afford to spend the time to make it look lovely. The exact same epithets are also used to describe other characters in the Homeric poems. For instance, “white-armed” is a common epithet used to describe the goddess Hera.

It seems that the Iliad and the Odyssey deliberately avoid giving too much description of Helen’s appearance because the poems want to allow each member of the audience to imagine Helen according to their own personal conception of ideal beauty. If the poet were to give a detailed description of Helen’s appearance, this would necessarily alienate some members of the audience. Describing something in detail limits how the reader can imagine it, but leaving the description vague allows the reader to imagine it however they want.

It is made clear in the Iliad that Helen’s beauty is more than just ordinary, mortal beauty; instead, her beauty is supernatural and otherworldly. The reason why Helen is so beautiful is because she is the daughter of Zeus himself and she is therefore partly divine. In Book Three of the Iliad, when the Trojans see Helen standing on the walls of Troy, one of them says, “αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικε,” which means “She is dreadfully like the immortal goddesses to look upon.” In other words, Helen is not just supposed to be beautiful, but hauntingly beautiful in an eerie, otherworldly sort of way.

ABOVE: Lithograph illustration from the early twentieth century by the English illustrator Walter Crane from an edition of The Story of Greece: Told to Boys and Girls by Mary MacGregor depicting Helen standing on the walls of Troy, as described in the Iliad

Helen in non-Homeric early Greek poems

That is pretty much the full extent of everything the Iliad tells us about what Helen of Troy supposedly looked like. Nonetheless, other, non-Homeric writings give us somewhat more detailed information about her appearance. Of course, here we must note that, because Helen is a fictional character, every ancient writer imagined Helen differently. We therefore should not assume that the way Helen is described by, say, Sappho accurately reflects the way the authors of the Iliad imagined her.

In the ancient Greek hexameter poem Works and Days, which was composed in around the eighth century BC or thereabout by the Boiotian poet Hesiodos of Askre, Helen is described as having “lovely hair” again. This same epithet recurs when Helen is described in surviving fragments from the Catalogue of Women, an early Greek hexameter poem that is traditionally attributed to Hesiodos, but probably was not actually composed by him.

In fragment nine of the Kypria, an early Greek epic poem that was part of the Epic Cycle but has now been mostly lost, Helen is described as “θαῦμα βροτοῖσι” (thaûma brotoîsi), which means “a wonder for mortals.” In a surviving fragment of a lyric poem written by the Greek poetess Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BC), which has been labeled by modern scholars “Fragment 23,” Helen is described as “ξανθή” (xanthḗ). This word is usually translated as “blonde-haired,” but is sometimes taken to mean more “blondish brown-haired” or even “reddish blonde-haired.”

In other lyric poems, Helen is sometimes described as “κυανῶπις” (kyanôpis), which means something like “having gleaming blue eyes.” All in all, this is a little bit more information, but still not a whole lot.

Helen in ancient Greek and Roman art

We also have a number of surviving ancient Greek and Roman depictions of Helen that give us some idea of how the Greeks and Romans imagined her. Here are some depictions of Helen from ancient Greek vase paintings:

ABOVE: Side B from an Attic black-figure amphora dating to c. 550 BC, discovered in the city of Vulci in Etruria, depicting Menelaos recovering his wife Helen. Helen is the woman in the middle.

ABOVE: Detail of a scene from an Attic red-figure krater dating to c. 450 – c. 440 BC discovered in Gnathia, Italy, depicting Menelaos recovering his wife Helen. Helen is the woman in the middle. The woman on the left is the goddess Aphrodite.

ABOVE: Side A from an Attic red-figure krater dating to c. 440 – c. 430 BC, depicting Helen being pursued by the Athenian king Theseus, who attempted to abduct her and force her to marry him when she was a teenager.

ABOVE: Side A from an Apulian red-figure bell-krater dating to c. 380 – c. 370 BC, depicting Helen and Paris. Paris is shown standing, holding a spear. Helen is shown seated and holding a fan.

You may have noticed that all of these vase paintings uniformly show Helen with what appears to be dark hair, which seems to run contrary to Sappho’s description of her hair as “ξανθή.” We do have a rather remarkable Roman fresco of Helen from Pompeii that shows her with what appears to be auburn hair:

ABOVE: First-century AD Roman fresco from Pompeii, showing Helen about to embark for Troy. The fresco is badly worn and most of the colors have faded, but you can still make out her face and most of her body from the waist up quite clearly.

Helen in later Greek and Roman writings

Later Greek and Roman sources are more forthcoming about the details of Helen’s physical appearance. For instance, in the epic poem The Fall of Troy (also known as the Posthomerica), which was written in Greek in around the late fourth century AD by the poet Kointos of Smyrna, Helen is described as “ἑλικοβλέφαρος” (helikoblépharos), which means “having spiraling eyelashes.”

A detailed description of Helen’s physical appearance appears in an extremely late work titled A History of the Fall of Troy, which was written in Latin in around the sixth century AD. This work was very popular during the Middle Ages.

The History of the Fall of Troy claims to be a first-hand account of the Trojan War written by a certain Dares of Phrygia, who supposedly fought in the war himself. It gives detailed descriptions of the physical appearances of all the major characters in the Iliad. Here is the description it gives of Helen and her brothers Castor and Pollux, as translated by R. M. Frazer:

“As for Castor and Pollux, he learned from the Trojans what they were like and how they looked: they were twins, blond haired, large eyed, fair complexioned, and wellbuilt with trim bodies. Helen resembled Castor and Pollux. She was beautiful, ingenuous, and charming. Her legs were the best; her mouth the cutest. There was a beauty-mark between her eyebrows.”

This is probably the most detailed written description of Helen we find in any classical source.

Post-antique depictions of Helen

In this final section, I thought I would include a few images of post-antique depictions of Helen to give you an idea of how Helen has been imagined by painters, illustrators, and filmmakers of the medieval and modern eras:

ABOVE: French manuscript illustration by Jean Pichore from an edition of Ovid’s Heroides, dating to the fourteenth century, depicting Helen

ABOVE: Painting of Paris and Helen leaving for Troy by the Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni (lived 1575–1642), dated to 1631

ABOVE: Painting of Paris and Helen from 1788 by the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David (lived 1748–1825)

ABOVE: Imaginative portrait painting of Helen by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (lived 1828–1882), dating to 1863, showing her with golden hair and dressed in a golden robe

ABOVE: Painting of Helen standing alone holding a mirror by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn de Morgan (lived 1855–1919), dating to 1898

ABOVE: Still of Helen as she is portrayed by German actress Diane Kruger in the 2004 Hollywood film Troy, written by David Benioff and directed by Wolfgang Petersen

ABOVE: Still of Helen as she is portrayed by German actress Bella Dayne in the eight-episode BBC miniseries Troy: Fall of a City from spring of 2018, directed by Owen Harris and Mark Brozel

Conclusion

As you can see, Helen of Troy has been imagined in many different ways throughout history. People of each era have remade Helen to match their own standards of perfect beauty. Today we are free to imagine Helen however we like, just as every other generation has been free to imagine her before us.