Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After Aphrodite’s victory in the Judgment, Paris built ships (aided by Aeneas in the *Cypria*) and sailed to Lacedaemon. Menelaus received him as a guest-friend. When Menelaus left for Crete to bury his maternal grandfather Catreus (Apollodorus) or on other business, Aphrodite brought Helen and Paris together. Helen sailed with Paris, taking much of Menelaus’s property. Hera sent a storm; they put in at Sidon (where Paris took the city in the *Cypria*) before reaching Troy. Paris’s brothers and the city received Helen; Cassandra prophesied disaster and was ignored. Classical sources differ sharply on consent. The *Cypria* and Apollodorus present Aphrodite’s agency as decisive: Helen leaves with Paris under the goddess’s gift, which reads as elopement under divine compulsion rather than a pure armed kidnapping. Homer’s Helen at Troy speaks as one who followed Paris yet bitterly regrets it—shame, longing for home, and blame of Aphrodite sit beside acknowledgment that she came. Later moralizing and Egyptian logos (Herodotus; Euripides’ *Helen*) split the story further by keeping the “real” Helen elsewhere and sending a phantom to Troy; that eidolon line is a meaningfully different version and is reserved for a separate entry if catalogued. For this cyclic/Apollodorean unit, the core is guest-violation plus Aphrodite’s promised transfer of Helen and goods from Sparta to Troy—the casus belli of the Achaean muster.