Introduction
Leda is the queen of Sparta, wife of the mortal king Tyndareus, best known for her union with Zeus, who came to her in the form of a swan. From this encounter, in most versions alongside her union with her own husband the same night, came four children, most famously Helen, whose beauty precipitates the Trojan War.
This figure marks the point where the genealogy of the gods gives way to the genealogy of heroes. A fuller account of their adventures belongs to a separate treatment of the Greek Heroic Cycle; this article covers their divine parentage and place in that transition.
Family
- Husband: Zeus
- Children: Pollux (Polydeuces), Castor, Helen
The swan and the egg
Zeus, in the form of a swan, either seduced or, in the more common and unsettling ancient telling, forced himself upon Leda. In the best-known version, she then laid one or two eggs, from which her children were born: Helen and Pollux, immortal, as Zeus's children, and, in most accounts, Clytemnestra and Castor, mortal, as the children of Tyndareus, conceived the same night.
Children
Leda's four children are central to later Greek myth: Helen's abduction triggers the Trojan War; Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, become legendary twin heroes; and Clytemnestra becomes the wife, and eventual murderer, of Agamemnon.