My Life and Times

Like Polyphemus, the Cyclops, and Asterion, the Minotaur, Helen is a figure of myth - the most beautiful woman in the world, the "face that launched a thousand ships" as Christopher Marlowe wrote. We know, however, that there really could have been a war that brought down the ancient city of Troy (now the mound of Hisarlik) around 1180 BCE, just at the end of the Bronze Age. Suppose, then, that the characters from the Homeric epic, The Iliad, had been real? There would be no actual gods, goddesses, nymphs or sorceresses, although the people themselves would have believed in them.

What there would have been is real people living real lives through a turbulent and bloody era of warfare and change. If one of those people had been Helen, and if she were to tell the story of her life from the perspective of her old age, what would she tell? What would she tell of knowing Menelaus, Paris, Priam and Hecuba, Hector and Andromache, Cassandra, Odysseus, even Achilles and Briseis? What would she say about the war and the great horse? In this novel, she tells the story of her life, and all these people were part of it.