It is a school classroom on a warm afternoon in late summer. The air is heavy in the room thanks to the weather, and perhaps heavier still because it is a Latin lesson.

Never mind, at least the pupils do not have to worry about declining their nouns because the teacher is showing slides of the ancient world. And even these turn out to be more exciting than expected. The first picture is particularly arresting: it is a smouldering Cretan snake goddess, her dress cut to the waist and obviously struggling to contain her pneumatic breasts.

For one of the girls in that west London classroom, more than 25 years ago now, it was a life-changing moment.

“I remember thinking, what were those people like?” says Bettany Hughes, the historian. “Who were these women creating images like that?” The wide-eyed schoolgirl kept up with her Latin and also learnt Greek. She went on to read ancient history at Oxford and is now carving out a career for herself as a popular historian. She has just published a book about Helen of Troy and the accompanying television programme, which was broadcast on Channel 4, caused some controversy.

The gripping story of Helen and her exciting love life has kept poets and dramatists in business for centuries. The best-known account is contained in Homer’s Iliad and tells how Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of the Spartans, was carried off by Paris, the son of Priam, king of the Trojans.

Writing many years after Homer, Christopher Marlowe coined the phrase “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships” for his play Doctor Faustus, in which Helen becomes the lover of Faustus. She also crops up in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where we find her condemned to rest with Paris in the second circle of hell for the sin of lust. All in all, literature has taken the view that Helen was no better than she ought to be.

Now Hughes has come to the rescue of this wronged heroine. Far from the helpless beauty who was carried off by handsome, rugged Paris, her legs kicking feebly against his back, Helen might well have been a busty skinhead — apparently a fashionable style among young princesses in the Spartan Bronze Age — who probably spotted the young Trojan prince and knew when she was on to a good thing. And this is where Hughes’s book and especially the television programme have proved so controversial.

Because, as Hughes well knows, there almost certainly was no Helen. She was part of the oral tradition of the ancient Greeks, who told how she was hatched from an egg after her mother was raped by Zeus, king of the gods, in the guise of a swan.

What Hughes has done instead is to write about the sort of person who Helen might have been or, rather, the sort of person who might have inspired the Helen myths.

In her book, which has been favourably reviewed, Hughes examines the sort of world that Helen might have known. Unfortunately, myths are not one of television’s strong points. Some critics feel that the myth has been presented as reality.

As Philip Howard, resident classicist at The Times, complains: “Bettany is made to utter on screen such problematic statements as: ‘From here Helen could have watched her two husbands fighting to the death’. Pull the other one, Bettany.”

Still, who better to examine the sex appeal of the ancients? Thanks to her previous programmes, Hughes has been dubbed the Nigella Lawson of history. There is even a website devoted to her on which male fans leave drooling tributes. “Woof! What a girl,” writes one, while another agrees: “She’s a right hottie.”

For a certain type of male viewer there is nothing more exciting than watching Hughes sweep back her long dark hair and say of an archeological site: “This just cries out — excavate me!” And you have to say that it certainly makes a nice change from watching Tony Robinson stare into a pit.