Helle

Helle was the daughter of Athamas and the cloud goddess Nephele, and the sister of Phrixus. She is the girl who fell from the flying golden ram into the strait between Europe and Asia, which was named the Hellespont after her. Her death belongs to the story of the Golden Fleece, which her brother carried to Colchis.

Family

Helle was the daughter of Athamas, a king in Boeotia, and Nephele; her brother was Phrixus (Apollodorus, Library 1.9.1). Athamas later took a second wife, Ino, who bore him Learchus and Melicertes (Library 1.9.1). The poets also call her “Athamantis”, the daughter of Athamas: Aeschylus speaks of the strait of “Helle, daughter of Athamas” (Aeschylus, Persians 68–70), and Apollonius calls the Hellespont the steep stream of “the daughter of Athamas” (Apollonius, Argonautica 1.927).

Ino’s Plot

Ino plotted against the children of Nephele. She persuaded the women of the country to parch the seed wheat without the knowledge of the men, so that the sown fields gave no crop. Athamas sent to Delphi to ask how to end the famine, and Ino bribed the messengers to report that the harvest would return if Phrixus were sacrificed to Zeus. When Athamas heard this, the people of the land forced him to bring Phrixus to the altar (Apollodorus, Library 1.9.1).

The Flight on the Golden Ram

Nephele snatched up her son and daughter and gave them a ram with a golden fleece, which she had received from Hermes. Carried through the sky by the ram, the two children crossed land and sea (Apollodorus, Library 1.9.1). When they were over the sea between Sigeum and the Chersonese, Helle slipped from the ram into the deep and was drowned, and the sea was called the Hellespont after her (Library 1.9.1). The Hellespont is the strait now called the Dardanelles; Aeschylus uses the name for the strait that Xerxes’ army crossed on a bridge of boats (Aeschylus, Persians 65–72). In Apollonius, as the Argonauts set out, the women of the city say that the dark wave should have overwhelmed Phrixus and the ram too when the maiden Helle perished, so that Jason’s mother Alcimede would have been spared her grief (Argonautica 1.256–259).

Phrixus and the Golden Fleece

Phrixus, according to Apollodorus, continued to the Colchians, whose king was Aeetes. Aeetes received him and gave him his daughter Chalciope. Phrixus sacrificed the ram to Zeus, the god of escape, and gave the fleece to Aeetes, who nailed it to an oak in a grove of Ares (Library 1.9.1). This is the fleece that Jason and the Argonauts later sailed to fetch. In Apollonius, Phrixus’ son Argus tells the Argonauts how Phrixus came from Greece to Aia, the city of Aeetes, riding the ram that Hermes had made golden, and sacrificed it to Zeus, the god of escape (Argonautica 2.1141–1147). Hyginus adds that the ram is the constellation Aries, set among the stars by Nephele (Hyginus, Astronomica 2.20). Helle herself plays no part in the voyage of the Argo: she is dead before it begins, and her story explains the name of the sea that the Argonauts passed on the way to Colchis.

Helle and Poseidon

A different tradition makes Helle the lover of a god after her fall. Hyginus writes that Helle fell into the Hellespont and, having been embraced by Poseidon, bore Paeon, though some said Edonus (Hyginus, Astronomica 2.20). Apollodorus does not mention this; the main account is that she drowned.

See Also: Phrixus, Jason, Argonauts, Athamas, Nephele, Poseidon, Ino, Aeetes