Helen of Troy bald, lusty and bloodthirsty

The dewy-eyed Helen of the film Troy was far from accurate, author says.

For centuries, Helen of Troy has been portrayed as a woman whose beauty was so great that it "launched a thousand ships" and caused a war.

Revered for her flowing hair and breathtaking features, she eloped with Paris, sparking the siege of Troy after her husband raised an army to take her back.

But, more than 3000 years after events described in The Iliad, Helen is to undergo a dramatic historical reappraisal.

According to a controversial new book, she was more likely to have been a shaven-headed, bare-breasted warrior princess whose appetite for sex was matched only by her insatiable bloodlust.

The book, the first detailed biography produced on Helen, seeks to identify the real woman behind the myth. And the face that emerges bears little resemblance to the one fondly imagined by generations of artists and poets launching those thousand ships.

Historian Bettany Hughes claims that the real Helen was a powerful Bronze Age princess, living in the Greek city-state of Sparta around 1250BC.

Basing her argument on extensive archaeological research, as well as surviving friezes from the period, Hughes depicts Helen as a dominant woman with a handful of snake-like strands of hair over an otherwise shaven, and perhaps brightly dyed, head. Her breasts would almost certainly have been exposed to reinforce her power and sexuality, and she would have been a fit, trained fighter.

"If you think of Helen, you imagine this beautiful, dewy-eyed blonde princess from pre-Raphaelite paintings, but that couldn't be further from the truth," said Hughes. "The real picture is much darker and gutsier - the complete opposite of the recent Troy movie."

Her claims, published in Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, come as excavations at Sparta have sparked speculation that Helen's long-lost palace may be about to emerge from the hillside. Bronze Age remains there have been identified by a British team as a palace complex.

A nearby temple - called the Menelaion - has been matched to early Greek sources which refer to it as "Helen's Shrine". Hughes' book is likely to renew debate over whether a "real" Helen existed.

Ken Wardle of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at Birmingham University, one of the world's leading experts on the period, voiced support for Hughes' work.

"I see every reason to believe that the Helen of legend, like Agamemnon or Menelaus, may have been a real character with a real background whose actions have been modified, embellished and distorted over the centuries."

- INDEPENDENT