Araam Abboud
Dayton, Ohio, United States

Helen of Troy is typically remembered as the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, a passive figure at the center of a patriarchal epic. But to consider Helen solely as the object of desire and the catalyst of war is to flatten her literary and historical possibilities. Across ancient and modern texts, Helen’s identity has never been fixed. In Stesichorus’s Palinode and Euripides’s Helen, she is not in Troy at all but in Egypt, untouched by the war. This alternative opens the door to a radical reimagining: what if Helen was not only exiled to Egypt but recast as a physician, a swnwt, or an ancient Egyptian healer?

Helen can be reframed not merely as a mythological symbol of beauty and conflict, but as a possible site of ancient female medical knowledge. Drawing on literary, poetic, and historical sources, this reading is not offered as a literal reconstruction of historical fact, but as a speculative act grounded in feminist theory and poetics. As theorists of feminist recovery history have noted, reconstructing women’s presence in male-dominated narratives requires not only textual analysis but the creative reinterpretation of silence and absence.¹

When did Helen go to Egypt?

…and he with his own eyes saw it. Such were the subtle medicines Zeus’ daughter had in her possessions, good things, and given to her by the wife of Thon, Polydamna of Egypt… (Odyssey 4.226–229)²

Homer’s Odyssey provides the first trace of Helen’s presence in Egypt, where she is described as having received powerful medicines from Polydamna. But the notion that Helen ever reached Troy is contested by three major ancient sources: Stesichorus, Herodotus, and Euripides. In Stesichorus’s Palinode, the “true” Helen was never in Troy; instead, the gods sent an eidolon (phantom or image) to deceive both Greeks and Trojans. Plato’s Phaedrus recounts that Stesichorus regained his sight after recanting his original slander of Helen²:

“That story is not true, and you did not go on the well-benched ships and you did not reach the citadel of Troy.”

This version is elaborated in Euripides’s Helen, where Hera creates a phantom Helen from clouds, and Hermes escorts the real Helen to Egypt.³ These variations disrupt the dominant myth and open a narrative space in which Helen’s Egyptian exile becomes central, not marginal.

Herodotus, while omitting the eidolon, confirms Helen’s displacement. According to his account, Paris and Helen (Figure 1) were shipwrecked in Egypt, where Paris was tried and expelled. Helen remained, and the Greeks only discovered the truth after the war.4 Though less mythic in tone, Herodotus’s account supports the plausibility of Helen’s long residence in Egypt, setting the stage for her potential transformation. One dimension often overlooked in the discussion of the eidolon is its symbolic significance. The phantom Helen serves not only as a narrative device but as a commentary on the instability of female identity in patriarchal myth. By fighting over an illusion, the Greeks and Trojans enact a war based on projected desire, not reality. The eidolon thus becomes a metaphor for the way women’s bodies and reputations are manipulated as stand-ins for male anxieties.

What did Helen do in Egypt?

While most ancient authors are preoccupied with Helen’s guilt or innocence, some accounts, especially poetic and cultic, suggest her cultural significance extended into rites of care and womanhood.⁵ The Odyssey connects Helen to pharmaka, suggesting not only magical ability but medicinal expertise.² This leads to a question: could Helen have practiced healing in Egypt?

In Helen in Egypt (1961), modernist poet H.D. (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle) radically re-envisions Helen’s exile.⁶ The poem presents two Helens: one a phantom adulteress of Troy, the other a woman of substance in Egypt. H.D., a central figure of the Imagist movement, uses fragmentation, visual rhythm, and spare language to construct a Helen engaged in deep spiritual and intellectual self-reflection. Her Helen studies hieroglyphs, contemplates her lovers and past selves, and searches for unity:

“They were not two but one,
Typhon–Osiris to the initiate.”⁶

This symbolic unification of opposites, Greek and Egyptian, mortal and divine, mirrors the healing logic of ancient Egypt, in which medicine and spirituality were inseparable. Notably, in H.D.’s retelling, Helen moves from disorientation to authorship of her own myth. The use of enjambment and stanzaic enjambment underscores Helen’s dissolving and recomposing identities. As David Cohen argues, this poetic form mirrors the psychic and cultural synthesis Helen undergoes, turning her exile into initiation.⁷

Through this lens, Helen’s time in Egypt is not passive exile but transformational apprenticeship: She emerges not only reconciled with her mythic double but also spiritually and culturally integrated into Egyptian knowledge systems.

Helen as an Egyptian physician

…and he with his own eyes saw it. Such were
the subtle medicines Zeus’ daughter had in her possessions,
good things, and given to her by the wife of Thon, Polydamna
of Egypt, where the fertile earth produces the greatest number
of medicines, many good in mixture, many malignant,
and every man is a doctor there and more understanding
than men elsewhere. These people are of the race of Paieon.
Now when she had put the medicine in, and told them to pour it… (Odyssey Book 4.226-233)²

Egypt is described in Homer as a land of exceptional medical expertise. Helen’s possession of such pharmaka implies her access to this tradition. In Egyptian culture, the title for physician was swnw, and the feminine form swnwt appears in a handful of inscriptions and analyses of ancient hieroglyphic grammar.⁹ One of the most notable examples is Peseshet, titled “Lady Overseer of the Female Physicians,” attested in Old Kingdom tomb inscriptions (Figure 2).¹⁰

Peseshet represents a vital counterpoint to mythic narratives of medicine. Active during the Fifth Dynasty, she is one of the earliest recorded women in medical history. Inscriptions in her tomb at Saqqara suggest she may have supervised a cadre of female healers or midwives. While some scholars debate whether she practiced medicine herself or held an administrative role, her presence in the record demonstrates that women held institutional power in Egyptian healing systems.

The swnw was both physician and priest-magician. Healing involved not just pharmacology, but rituals, spells, and divine invocations.¹¹ Helen’s divine ancestry and potential priestess status, combined with her Egypt-based self-reflection and knowledge of hieroglyphs in H.D.’s telling, place her well within this model of hybrid medical-religious practitioner. Her association with Polydamna, who may herself have been a swnwt, supports this interpretation.

The term demiourgoi in Greek (craftsmen or public service professionals) may overlap conceptually with the Egyptian swnw, suggesting cultural exchange and transmission of knowledge across civilizations.¹² Thus, Helen becomes not merely an exoticized guest in Egypt but a possible embodiment of syncretic healing traditions.

The concept of pharmaka in Greek literature is inherently ambivalent. These substances blur the lines between cure and poison, blessing and curse. Helen’s knowledge and use of pharmaka in the Odyssey position her as both dangerous and wise—traits that often uneasily coexist in portrayals of powerful women. In this light, Helen’s pharmaka are not merely medicinal tools but literary symbols for feminine ambiguity, mastery, and subversion.

While this reimagining of Helen as a swnwt allows for a feminist reclamation of mythic womanhood, it also risks reinscribing a dynamic that recent decolonial feminists have urged scholars to confront: the centering of white or Euro-Greek women within non-Western epistemologies. As Saidiya Hartman¹³ and Françoise Vergès¹⁴ note, feminist recovery must be careful not to repeat colonial patterns of erasure or extractive admiration. Helen’s transformation into a healer relies on her access to Egyptian knowledge systems, but the figures who embody those systems, like Polydamna and the historical Peseshet, remain unnamed or underexamined. Contemporary feminist theory calls for us to not only elevate silenced women, but to question why certain women are elevated over others, and how whiteness and mythic status influence that elevation.

Reconsidering Helen

Reframing Helen as a swnwt resists reductive binaries of seductress or saint, betrayer or victim. In the Odyssey, she is a dispenser of drugs and a woman of cunning. In Helen, she is morally complex and displaced. In H.D., she is reflective and spiritually ascendant. Across these texts, her presence in Egypt enables a different kind of authorship; one rooted in care, knowledge, and transformation.

This reading contributes to feminist historiography by resisting the silences surrounding women in ancient medical history. The Helen who disappears from Greek texts after Troy re-emerges here as a figure of healing and agency. As myth, history, and poetics converge, she stands as a vessel of cultural and epistemic multiplicity.

Conclusion

Whether shaped by Homer, Euripides, Stesichorus, Herodotus, or H.D., Helen remains elusive, refracted through the lenses of myth and memory. But in placing her in Egypt, not as a passive exile but as a cultural mediator and possible swnwt, we not only challenge dominant narratives, but also expand the interpretive possibilities of both mythology and women’s history.

Recovering Helen as a healer also speaks to contemporary efforts to reclaim women’s historical authority in science and medicine. Today, there continue to be disparities in how gendered knowledge is produced, validated, and remembered. By reinterpreting a figure as iconic as Helen through the lens of healing, this paper participates in broader movements to make visible the intellectual labor of women.

At the same time, this recovery is intentionally self-aware: it does not seek to replace one dominant figure with another, but to use Helen as a narrative opening; one that gestures toward the erased lives of figures like Polydamna or Peseshet, who remain shadowed in both myth and scholarship.

References

1. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York, NY: Penguin Classics; 1996.
2. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2005.
3. Euripides. Helen. Translated by E.P. Coleridge. London: George Bell & Sons; 1891.
4. Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. New York, NY: Penguin; 2003.
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6. Doolittle H. Helen in Egypt. New York, NY: New Directions; 1961.
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