Helen (Phone Operator)

Season: 1, Episodes: 1, Faction: N/A

Overview

Helen is a 900-type phone sex operator that Locke was infatuated with.

War (Hunting)

Ferryboat

Death

Fire

Running (Athletic)

1×04 – Walkabout

Locke began calling Helen after breaking up with the real Helen, with whom he had had a relationship. She charged $89.95 an hour, and Locke had spent a great deal of money talking to her over an eight-month period. He bought two tickets to Australia, and hoped that she would go with him. However, she turned him down, saying that she was not allowed to meet “customers”.

Helen was known to Warren as he mentioned her during Locke’s discussion about his walkabout to Randy. (“Walkabout”)

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Related Character Images

Decoded Season 1 Characters

John Locke

Warren

Randy Nations

Kate Austen

Michael Dawson

Helen Norwood

Key Episode(s) to Decoding the Character

1x04 "Walkabout"

Wiki Info

Atalanta (“balanced”) is a character in Greek mythology. Atalanta was the daughter of Iasus (or Mainalos or Schoeneus, according to Hyginus), a Boeotian (according to Hesiod) or an Arcadian princess (according to Apollodorus). She is often described as a goddess. Apollodorus is the only one who gives an account of Atalanta’s birth and upbringing. King Iasus wanted a son; when Atalanta was born, he left her on a mountaintop to die. Some stories say that a she-bear suckled and cared for Atalanta until hunters found and raised her, and she learned to fight and hunt as a bear would. She was later reunited with her father.

Having grown up in the wilderness, Atalanta became a fierce hunter and was always happy. She took an oath of virginity to the goddess Artemis; when two centaurs, Rhoikos and Hylaios, tried to rape her, Atalanta killed them.

Calydonian Boar Hunt

When Artemis was forgotten at a sacrifice by King Oineus, she was angered and sent a wild boar that ravaged the land, men, and cattle and prevented crops from being sown. Atalanta joined Meleager and many other famous heroes on a hunt for the boar. Many of the men were angry that a woman was joining them, but Meleager, though married, lusted for Atalanta, and so he persuaded them to include her. Several of the men were killed before Atalanta became the first to hit the boar and draw blood. After Meleager finally killed the boar with his spear, he awarded the skin to Atalanta. Meleager’s uncles, Plexippus and Toxeus, were angry and tried to take the skin from her. In revenge, Meleager killed his uncles. Wild with grief, Meleager’s mother Althaea threw a charmed log on the fire, which consumed Meleager’s life as it burned.

Footrace

After the Calydonian boar hunt, Atalanta was rediscovered by her father. He wanted her to be wed, but Atalanta, uninterested in marriage, agreed to marry only if her suitors could outrun her in a footrace. Those who lost would be killed. King Schoeneus agreed, and many young men died in the attempt until Melanion (or Hippomenes) came along. Melanion asked the goddess Aphrodite for help, and she gave him three golden apples in order to slow Atalanta down. The apples were irresistible, so every time Atalanta got ahead of Melanion, he rolled an apple ahead of her, and she would run after it. In this way, Melanion won the footrace and came to marry Atalanta. Eventually they had a son Parthenopaios, who was one of the Seven against Thebes. Zeus (or Cybele, or Rhea) turned Atalanta and Melanion into lions after they made love together in one of his temples. Other accounts say that Aphrodite changed them into lions because they did not give her proper honor. She filled Melanion with lust and he stripped Atalanta in the temple. They were cursed by the priests after seeing Melanion stroking her large breasts as if they were Aphrodite’s own (thus suggesting that her naked form was as beautiful as the goddess’s). The belief at the time was that lions could not mate with their own species, only with leopards; thus Atalanta and Hippomenes would never be able to remain with one another.

Apollodorus also says she wrestled and defeated Peleus at the funeral games for Pelias.

In some versions of the quest for the Golden Fleece, Atalanta sailed with the Argonauts as the only female among them, suffered injury in the battle at Colchis, and was healed by Medea. Other authors claim Jason would not allow a woman on the ship.

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Mythological Family Members & Associated Deities

MELEAGER	ARTEMIS	APHRODITE	ZEUS	CYBELE	Debra	PELEUS
MEDEA	JASON

Wiki Info

The Calydonian Boar is one of the monsters of Greek mythology that had to be overcome by heroes of the Olympian age. Sent by Artemis to ravage the region of Calydon in Aetolia because its king failed to honor her in his rites to the gods, it was killed in the Calydonian Hunt, in which many male heroes took part, but also a powerful woman, Atalanta, who won its hide by first wounding it with an arrow. This outraged some of the men, with tragic results. Strabo was under the impression that the Calydonian Boar was an offspring of the Crommyonian Sow vanquished by Theseus.

Importance in Greek mythology and art

The Calydonian Boar is one of the chthonic monsters in Greek mythology, each set in a specific locale. Sent by Artemis to ravage the region of Calydon in Aetolia, it met its end in the Calydonian Hunt, in which all the heroes of the new age pressed to take part, with the exception of Heracles, who vanquished his own Goddess-sent Erymanthian Boar separately. Since the mythic event drew together numerous heroes—among whom were many who were venerated as progenitors of their local ruling houses among tribal groups of Hellenes into Classical times—the Calydonian Boar hunt offered a natural subject in classical art, for it was redolent with the web of myth that gathered around its protagonists on other occasions, around their half-divine descent and their offspring. Like the quest for the Golden Fleece (Argonautica) or the Trojan War that took place the following generation, the Calydonian Hunt is one of the nodes in which much Greek myth comes together.

Both Homer and Hesiod and their listeners were aware of the details of this myth, but no surviving complete account exists: some papyrus fragments found at Oxyrhynchus are all that survive of Stesichorus’ telling; the myth repertory called Bibliotheke (“The Library”) contains the gist of the tale, and before that was compiled the Roman poet Ovid told the story in some colorful detail in his Metamorphoses.

Hunt

King Oeneus (“wine man”) of Calydon, an ancient city of west-central Greece north of the Gulf of Patras, held annual harvest sacrifices to the gods on the sacred hill. One year the king forgot to include Great “Artemis of the Golden Throne” in his offerings Insulted, Artemis, the “Lady of the Bow”, loosed the biggest, most ferocious boar imaginable on the countryside of Calydon. It rampaged throughout the countryside, destroying vineyards and crops, forcing people to take refuge inside the city walls (Ovid), where they began to starve.

Oeneus sent messengers out to look for the best hunters in Greece, offering them the boar’s pelt and tusks as a prize.

Among those who responded were some of the Argonauts, Oeneus’ own son Meleager, and, remarkably for the Hunt’s eventual success, one woman— the huntress Atalanta, the “indomitable”, who had been suckled by Artemis as a she-bear and raised as a huntress, a proxy for Artemis herself (Kerenyi; Ruck and Staples). Artemis appears to have been divided in her motives, for it was also said that she had sent the young huntress because she knew her presence would be a source of division, and so it was: many of the men, led by Kepheus and Ankaios, refused to hunt alongside a woman. It was the smitten Meleager who convinced them. Nonetheless it was Atalanta who first succeeded in wounding the boar with an arrow, although Meleager finished it off, and offered the prize to Atalanta, who had drawn first blood. But the sons of Thestios, who considered it disgraceful that a woman should get the trophy where men were involved, took the skin from her, saying that it was properly theirs by right of birth, if Meleagros chose not to accept it. Outraged by this, Meleagros slew the sons of Thestios and again gave the skin to Atalanta (Bibliotheke). Meleager’s mother, sister of Meleager’s slain uncles, took the fatal brand from the chest where she had kept it (see Meleager) and threw it once more on the fire; as it was consumed, Meleager died on the spot, as the Fates had foretold. Thus Artemis achieved her revenge against King Oeneus.

During the hunt, Peleus accidentally killed his host Eurytion. In the course of the hunt and its aftermath, many of the hunters turned upon one another, contesting the spoils, and so the Goddess continued to be revenged (Kerenyi, 114): “But the goddess again made a great stir of anger and crying battle, over the head of the boar and the bristling boar’s hide, between Kouretes and the high-hearted Aitolians” (Homer, Iliad, ix.543).

The boar’s hide that was preserved in the Temple of Athena Alae at Tegea in Laconia was reputedly that of the Calydonian Boar, “rotted by age and by now altogether without bristles” by the time Pausanias saw it in the second century CE. He noted that the tusks had been taken to Rome as booty from the defeated allies of Mark Anthony by Augustus; “one of the tusks of the Calydonian boar has been broken”, Pausanias reports, “but the remaining one, having a circumference of about half a fathom, was dedicated in the Emperor’s gardens, in a shrine of Dionysos“. The Calydonian Hunt was the theme of the temple’s main pediment.

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