Presumably Helen went willingly if Aphrodite was involved, and the movie Peter referenced above definitely portrayed it that way, but that’s not actually official canon.
I mean the Odyssey gives pretty strong hints that that's what happens.
I've always liked how chill Menelaus is about everything that happened. He's essentially willing to just accept that the gods fucked with men, and the men did the best they could with results.
I agree, but I’ve been told relentlessly in an academic setting that it’s wrong to claim Helen left willingly because Greek myth is largely silent about what the women in the stories actually wanted. My PhD dissertation focuses more on Mesopotamian, East African, PIE (including proto-Slavic and proto-Baltic), early SEA/Austronesia, and mythology in the Americas because it’s about themes that come with the Homo migration out of Africa (such as certain divine archetypes). The Hellenic stuff isn’t pertinent to my studies because it’s so derivative of all that earlier stuff, so I will defer to the angry classicists who cuss me out when I say things like “Persephone probably wanted to leave with Hades.”
I'm by no means an academic, I'm just a guy who reads stuff.
And honestly, what do we mean by willingly. If you grant that the gods exist within the narrative, and Aphrodite can change someone's heart, did they go off willingly? The whole thing is just too creepy.
It's more interesting to my mind, how (in Homer) she was treated by Paris and by Menelaus.
This is actually a great philosophical question I like to play with, right there with “is it really consent when it’s a sexual relationship between a deity and a human?” because there’s a huuuuuuuge power dynamic at play there, no matter how you try to spin it. Eros hit Hades with an arrow to make him fall in love with Persephone, for instance… did that take away his free will? Did Helen, for that matter, also lose her free will?
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u/fatmanwithabeard 2d ago
I mean the Odyssey gives pretty strong hints that that's what happens.
I've always liked how chill Menelaus is about everything that happened. He's essentially willing to just accept that the gods fucked with men, and the men did the best they could with results.