Goddess, Princess, Whore?

No one really knows if the characters in the Iliad and Odyssey have a particle of basis in fact or are just myth. Much like the Old Testament the remaining material culture makes it little more than a speculative game.

Not that I'm not competent to judge archaeological speculations.

Helen of Troy has long been pictured as a lovely blonde, re-imagined by each generation according to its ideals of female beauty. The recent Troy movie naturally gave us the classic European blond beauty of perfect symmetries.

No reason to believe that ancient Mycenaean civilization shared anything remotely akin to our sexual aesthetics.

Bettany Hughes in Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore gives us the picture of a woman who might've fought Xena to a standstill looking something like an undead creature come back to wreak vengeance in a horror movie.

A willfully feminist recreation of the ancient legend? Perhaps. Hardly matters (unless of course you have strong scholarly interests in the interpretation).

But, more than 3,000 years after events described in The Iliad, Helen is to undergo a dramatic historical reappraisal. According to a controversial new book, she was more likely to have been a shaven-headed, bare-breasted warrior princess whose appetite for sex was matched only by her insatiable bloodlust. ...

The author, the historian Bettany Hughes, claims that the real Helen was a powerful Bronze Age princess, living in the Greek city-state of Sparta around 1250BC. Basing her argument on extensive archaeological research, as well as surviving friezes from the period, Hughes conjures a picture of Helen as a dominant woman who would have worn a handful of snake-like strands of hair over an otherwise shaven, and perhaps brightly dyed, head. Her breasts would almost certainly have been exposed to reinforce her power and sexuality, and she would have been a fit, trained fighter.

Meet Helen of Troy: bald-headed, bare-breasted and bloodthirsty