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I haven't heard of Euripides being exiled or torn apart by wild dogs...
Otherwise, the story of the apple is broadly correct, but not actually mentioned much in the Iliad - only once, at the end, and then briefly. The story of the Judgement of Paris is covered in a lost epic called the Cypria, written as, in effect, a prequel to the Iliad. The party is the wedding banquet for Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles - so we're back to the workings of fate, there.
So, Aphrodite gets the apple from Paris, and he steals Helen from Menelaus. Helen has already been abducted once, by Theseus and Pirithous. She was rescued by the Dioskouri, who nicked Theseus' mother as payback. This sort of thing happens a lot. To forestall further problems, the leaders of the Greeks signed a pact during the contest for her hand of mutual protection, stating that they would ally to return Helen to her eventual husband - who turned out to be Menelaus. This was Odysseus' idea, proving once and for all that it's not a good idea to be smart. That leads on to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the seige of Troy and all that beastliness.
Couple of minor notes - Helen is generally identified as the daughter of Zeus by Leda, hatched from an egg after Zeus ravished her in the guise of a swan. The Cypria, though, has her as the child of Zeus and Nemesis, given to Leda to raise. Either way, her twin is Clytaemestra - it's a bit of a family affair all round. The Cypria starts with Zeus plannign to reduce the population of the world, and the Trojan War, along with the Theban war, is seen as part of this divine plan. As Knight's Move says, some patterns exonerate Helen in one way or another - Herodotus has her held in Egypt, as does Euripides - these probably sharing a common ancestor in Stesichorus, allegedly struck blind for dissing Helen in one poem, and cured by recanting with the claim that she was not at Troy. However, the Helen in the Iliad, and then the Odyssey, appears to have been to Troy and back.
Thucydides suggests that the war was actually over trade routes, and that the whole Helen business was PR. Cynic. |
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