Book excerpt: This monograph lays the groundwork for a new approach of the characterization of the Homeric Helen, focusing on how she is addressed and named in the Iliad and the Odyssey and especially on her epithets. Her social identity in Troy and in Sparta emerges in the words used to address and name her. Her epithets, most of them referring to her beauty or her kinship with Zeus and coming mainly from the narrator, make her the counterpart of the heroes.