“Of all Helen’s roles in the literary and artistic corpus (and it is a long career – she has been forgotten by not a single generation since she entered the written record 2,700 years ago), it is her part as fantasy whore that has been most tenacious. Her many sexual partners … are trotted out by ancient and modern authors alike as the gossip columns would the client-list of a high-class prostitute. And so Euripides calls her a ‘bitch-whore’; she is Shakespeare’s ‘strumpet’.”