A thousand ships, ten years, and Homer gives her almost nothing to say
Helen of Troy holds a 4.6 from two hundred and forty-two people, is listed at one to thirty pounds, and she is the twenty-eighth woman in this survey.
And she is the most famous of all of them, and she has almost nothing to say.
The face that launched a thousand ships
Which is not Homer.
It is Marlowe – Doctor Faustus, written around 1592, some two and a half thousand years after the events it describes.
And it is the single most quoted line about her, and essentially everybody attributes it to antiquity.
What Homer gives her
Very little.
She appears. She is described. And when she speaks, she speaks mostly to blame herself – she calls herself a shameless creature, and a dog, and she wishes she had died before it started.
She is given self-loathing and almost nothing else.
And the two greatest poems in the Western tradition are, in a sense, about her – and she is barely a character in either.
And the war was not about her
Which is the honest reading and which the ancients half-knew.
Because Troy sits at the Dardanelles – the strait connecting the Aegean to the Black Sea – and whoever holds it controls the grain and the trade of an entire region.
It is one of the most strategically valuable pieces of ground on earth, and it has been fought over repeatedly for three thousand years, and it was fought over again in 1915.
A coalition of Greek states did not spend ten years besieging a city because a woman left her husband.
They went for the straits.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and a thousand and one hundred and three articles.
The tellable version wins.
Because a war about customs duties on the Black Sea grain trade is not a poem.
And a war about a beautiful woman is.
And three thousand years later, everybody knows her name, and almost nobody has heard of the Dardanelles.
And she is blamed
Which is the last thing.
Because in most tellings she is abducted – and in the ones where she goes willingly, she is under the compulsion of a goddess.
Either way, the agency is not hers.
And she is blamed anyway, for three millennia, and the men who chose to sail are not.
Verdict
Good bar, cheap, strong number.
Go, and ask who actually wanted the war.
And Troy was real
Which is the thing that still surprises people.
Because for a very long time it was regarded as pure legend – and then Schliemann dug at Hisarlik in the 1870s and found a city.
Several cities, in fact, built on top of each other over thousands of years.
And one of the layers shows destruction – burning, and hasty repairs, and evidence of violence – at roughly the right period.
Which does not prove the Iliad. It proves that there was a fortified city, at the strategically critical point, which was destroyed.
Schliemann, it should be said, was a fabulist who lied constantly about his own discoveries and dug straight through the layer he was looking for.