Helen
in classic fable, the daughter of Jupiter and Leda, of Jupiter and Nemesis, or of the King Tyndareus and Leda, his wife, according to the various statements of the poets, was the most beautiful woman of her time, and married Menelaus, King of Sparta. Her guilty elopement with Paris, one of the sons of Priam, King of Troy, who had been sent to Lacedæmon as ambassador, led to the Trojan War, and the destruction, after 10 years' siege, of Troy . On the death of Paris, she married his brother Deiphobus, and when the city was at last sacked, returned to Sparta with her husband Menelaus. Being banished from Sparta on the death of Menelaus, she retired to the island of Rhodes, of Rhodes , where, having excited the envy of Polyxo, the queen of the isle, she was tied to a tree and strangled.