“The Greeks never said that the limit could not he overstepped. They said it existed and that whoever dared to exceed it was mercilessly struck down. Nothing in present history can contradict them.”

Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus’s essay is a searching inquiry into the origins of the hubris and fanaticism that laid waste to twentieth-century Europe. At once a celebration of the classical virtues of balance and serenity and a warning to Camus’s contemporaries, Helen’s Exile is a profound analysis of the nature of modernity.