Helen
A phantom of cloud went to Troy in her place, carried off by Paris, while the woman herself was set down in Egypt, where she has spent seventeen years at a dead king's tomb evading his son's demand that she marry him. A shipwrecked Greek in rags comes ashore with a story about the wife he recovered from Troy and has hidden in a cave. Taking the version Stesichorus and Herodotus preferred, it turns the cause of the war into a fiction and is the clearest of Euripides' experiments with escape comedy.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ The Odyssey
- ↓ Thesmophoriazusae
Attributes
Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 55% · 13 shared
- 54% · 11 shared
- 52% · 11 shared
- 51% · 9 shared
- 45% · 9 shared
- 45% · 8 shared