She is 'the face that launched a thousand ships'; the woman blamed for
the Trojan War - a conflict that caused countless deaths - but who was
the real Helen of Troy? Bettany Hughes travels across the eastern
Mediterranean to disentangle myth from reality and find the truth about
the most beautiful woman on earth. Helen's story is a dark and very
human drama, interweaving pleasure and pain, sex and violence, love and
hate: a tale that started with a messy love affair and ended with a
bloody and disastrous conflict. Hughes argues that many images of the
mythic Helen, from Hollywood movies to romantic paintings, have got her
all wrong: Helen was the original sex goddess. And the film reveals just
how a pre-historic princess in Bronze Age Greece - a real Helen - would
have looked. The feature-length documentary takes in some of the most
beautiful scenery of the ancient world, from the magnificent citadel at
Mycenae and the spectacular shrine to Helen in Sparta, to the
archaeological site in modern Turkey that will be forever linked with
the war fought in Helen's name: Troy.
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