ShmoopTube

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Helen, a la Shmoop.

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I know a lot of you girls out there have dreamt of having a face like this.

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Most of you put on makeup to hide your imperfections.

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I, on the other hand, put on makeup to hide just how perfect I am.

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If I didn’t, guys just would never leave me alone.

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I’m here to tell you ladies that being the most beautiful woman in the world ain’t

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all it’s cracked up to be.

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Trouble started for me not long after I emerged from the egg laid by my mother Leda.

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If you’re wondering why my mom laid an egg, it’s because my dad Zeus seduced her in

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the form of a swan.

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Yep, things were a little twisted in ancient Greece. But I digress...

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The first time I ran into trouble was when that lechy king of Athens,

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Theseus, kidnapped me when I was a little girl.

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Luckily, my brothers Castor and Pollux marched an army to Athens and rescued me, and I was

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back to our hometown of Sparta before anything too traumatic happened.

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“Traumatic” being a relative term in Greece.

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You’d think having one war fought over you would be enough for one lifetime,

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but the Fates had more in store for me.

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Eventually, I married a beefy guy

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from Mycenae <<MY-suh-NAE>> named Menelaus <<men-uh-LAY-iss>>.

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To be frank, I wasn’t into him.

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He was kinda dumb and always played second fiddle

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to his egomaniacal brother Agamemnon <<ag-uh-MEM-non>>.

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My father insisted, though.

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So the next thing I know, Menelaus and I were stuck together for better or worse.

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And believe me when I say that it was about to get a lot worse.

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One day, in walked the charming, handsome Paris of Troy.

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It’s part of my job as Queen of Sparta to entertain foreign envoys.

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Little did I know what sort of entertainment this foreigner had in mind.

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Turns out he’d just judged a beauty contest between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.

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Because Paris judged Aphrodite the most beautiful, the goddess of love awarded me as the prize.

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Can you believe it? Just like my father, the goddess sold me like a piece of meat.

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Next thing I knew, Aphrodite caused me to fall madly in love with Paris,

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and I was sailing with him back to Troy.

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Needless to say, this did not go over well with Menelaus or the rest of Greece.

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They showed up at the gates of Troy with a gigantic army, and they were beyond ticked off.

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Paris refused to give me back, and the horrible Trojan War ensued.

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The war revealed a couple things to me. For one, war is gross. Real gross.

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For two, Paris was a total wuss-ball.

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Half the time, he hid in the back of the lines and let his brother Hector fight his battles for him.

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Yeah, somewhere in there Aphrodite’s spell wore off, and I saw him for what he was.

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It was all really terrible.

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The Trojans hated me because I’d brought all this down on them,

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and the Greeks all thought I was a tramp.

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Everybody hated me more and more as the war got bloodier and bloodier.

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There was death everywhere.

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Hector died, the Greek hero Achilles died, even Paris died.

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And, eventually, thanks to Odysseus’s wooden horse trick all of Troy went up in flames.

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I thought Menelaus was going to kill me when he came marching into Troy.

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But I batted my eyes, and the dumb lunk took me back.

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And now I’m forever known as the face that launched a thousand ships.

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I try to tell my side of the story,

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but everybody still thinks I’m a vain, self-centered floozy

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who brought nothing but destruction to the world.

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So there you have it.

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Being the hottest woman on Earth… really isn’t so hot.

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