Aside from the modern emphasis on Helen’s beauty as the singular rationale for the Trojan War (ie. “The face that launched a thousand ships”), the ancients didn’t place the same emphasis on romantic love as we do today — they had arranged marriages that served political alliances of which Helen was considered property.

Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and her marriage to him was arranged by both her father Tyndareus and the political leaders of the time.  Her later abduction is described a strategic move to provoke conflict or forge new political alliances. The act of taking Helen could have been a way for Troy to assert dominance or to incite war, knowing well the reaction it would provoke from the Greeks, particularly from Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon, who would rally the Achaean forces. This political dimension is often explored in analyses that look at the power dynamics and alliances of the time.

In other words, men didn’t go to war simply to fight for women out of giddy lust (modern gynocentric interpretation of the Trojan War), but instead did so for wider family alliances and political motives. The phenomenon of international abductions, still carried out by a variety of regimes today, can equally involve male or female hostages – and it leads either to escalated conflict as it did with case of Helen, or to negotiated release. These abductions, including Helen’s, have nothing to do with humans being an inherently ‘gynocentric species,’ which has become a peculiarly modern way of interpreting all historical events.