Of all the variations on mythological events we see in Ancient Greek tragedies, Euripides’ Helen might show the biggest departure from the traditional version of the story. Everyone who has read Homer’s Iliad knows that the Trojan War was started because Helen either ran off to Troy with Paris or was kidnapped by him, abandoning her rightful husband Menelaus, and the only solution to this problem was, of course, military invasion. This, like most other things in Greek mythology, was a direct result of the frivolity of the gods. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite got into a fight over who was the most beautiful and chose Paris to judge them, and each offered him a bribe for his favorable judgment. Paris accepted Aphrodite’s bribe: the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen) as his wife.

This is the traditional version of events, but Euripides gives us a different telling in his play Helen, produced in 412 BC. The title character herself tells us what really happened:

They called me Helen. Let me tell you all the evils,
all that has happened to me. The three goddesses came
to remote Ida, and to Paris, for him to judge
their loveliness, and beauty was the cause. These were
Hera, Cypris, and Zeus’ daughter Athena.
But Aphrodite, promising my loveliness
(if what is cursed is ever lovely) to the arms
of Paris, won her way. Idaean Paris left
his herds for Sparta, thinking I was to be his.
But Hera, angry that she was not given the prize,
made void as wind the love that might have been for Paris
and gave him, not me, but in my likeness fashioning
a breathing image out of the sky’s air, bestowed
this on King Priam’s son, who thinks he holds me now
but holds a vanity which is not I.

— Helen, Helen 22-36

Paris gets a fake image, and it turns out the real Helen was secretly whisked away to Egypt by Hera and hangs out there while Menelaus, Agamemnon, and the rest of Achaea think she’s off in Troy being the biggest floozy in the ancient world.

Of course, the war still happens in this version of the story because no one finds out about the switcheroo until well after the war is over. After all, there really is an image of Helen in Troy for Menelaus to win back. The war drags on for ten years, the Achaeans sack the city, and Menelaus finally wins back the woman he thinks is his wife and sails home to live happily ever after. Except he doesn’t make it home because the Achaeans angered the gods by behaving terribly during the sack of Troy, and the foul winds he encounters on his homeward journey send him off on a mini Odyssey of his own, until he ends up shipwrecked on the shores of Egypt a full seven years after the war ended. For anyone counting, that makes seventeen years that Menelaus has been laboring under the false belief that the woman now on board his ship is his wife. This is where the action of the play picks up.

The action of the play centers first around Menelaus discovering where his real wife has been this whole time, and then around their plot to escape back to Sparta out of the clutches of Theoclymenus the king of Egypt. Helen has kept her virtue intact for the last seventeen years, being under the protection of Theoclymenus’ father Proteus. But Proteus has died recently, and it turns out that being the most beautiful woman in the world will get you some unwanted suitors, like Theoclymenus for instance. Theoclymenus is just certain that Helen’s rightful husband is dead by this point, and without the restraint of his recently dead father intends to take her as his wife, by force if necessary. Euripides’ version of Helen seems to be closer in spirit to Penelope than to the traditional portrayal of Helen, right down to the fending off of unwanted suitors.

Luckily, Menelaus has arrived just in time to whisk Helen back to Sparta, but a few obstacles remain, namely the fact that he has just been shipwrecked and is therefore without a seaworthy ship. Just asking Theoclymenus for a ship is out of the question, as he would definitely not be happy to find out that Helen’s husband is still alive, and would definitely kill Menelaus if he found out. So Helen and Menelaus hatch a scheme. Menelaus will pretend to be the sole survivor of Menelaus’ crew and will come to the palace to report his own death. The disguise won’t be hard to sell since Menelaus has actually been shipwrecked, and looks like it. Helen will go into mourning for her dead husband and will ask Theoclymenus for permission to conduct funeral rites, which must be done at sea of course, because Spartan custom demands that those who died at sea be buried at sea. After the burial, Helen will willingly give in and marry Theoclymenus.

Enticed by the prospect of finally getting to marry Helen, Theoclymenus readily provides a ship for the funeral at sea and the plan goes off mostly without a hitch, except for one minor wrinkle caused by Theoclymenus’ prophetess sister Theonoë. Being a prophetess, she knows who Menelaus really is, and the couple must convince her not to tell her brother. They do so fairly easily, and escape back to Sparta in Theoclymenus’ ship.

If this all sounds mighty familiar, it’s probably because Menelaus is doing exactly what Paris does in the traditional version of the myth: playing a trick on a king and taking advantage of his sense of hospitality to run off with Helen. So why do Menelaus and Helen seem like the good guys in this story, when in the traditional version Paris and Helen seem at best like lovestruck stupidlings with a reckless disregard for the safety of their entire cities? The answer, I think, is double inversion.

First, let’s count the ways this play is an inversion of the traditional story of Helen and Paris. I’ll do this in table form so I don’t have to keep repeating “in this version” and “in the traditional version”. I’m sure there are more ways than just these, but this is what I came up with:

The main point here is that in both versions, a trick is played to upset the status quo of the situation. In the traditional version, the story’s status quo aligns with what could be seen as the right order of things: Helen is living in her own home city, lawfully married to her husband Menelaus, and the city is at peace. In Euripides’ telling, the story’s status quo is an upside-down world, a world where everything is the opposite of what it should be: Helen has been cast out of her home city through no fault of her own, she is an exile in a barbarian land on the edge of the known world being courted by a barbarian king, and her city has been through a long and destructive war that left her rightful husband also wandering adrift all over the sea, away from his rightful place.

What is the effect on a story of a trick being played that upsets the status quo? If the story’s status quo was the right order of things as in the traditional story of Helen and Paris, the world is turned upside-down and chaos ensues. In this particular story, a war happens, the sturdy souls of many great fighters are hurled down to the house of death, and the soldiers of the civilized world become barbarians in their blood lust when the war is finally won. On the other hand, what if the world was already upside-down?

The only way for an upside-down world to be set back to rights is for it to be turned upside-down again, and this is what the trickster does in a double inversion story like Helen. By turning everything on its head again, the trickster restores the right order of things. Helen finishes this story reunited with her rightful husband and on her way back to her home city to live in peace. So when is trickery something the Good Guys™ do in a story? When the world was already upside-down, and the trick restores it to right-side-up.