face that launched a thousand ships, Was this the

A line from the sixteenth-century play Doctor Faustus , by Christopher Marlowe. Faustus says this when the devil Mephistopheles (Marlowe spells the name “Mephistophilis”) shows him Helen of Troy , the most beautiful woman in history. The “thousand ships” are warships, a reference to the Trojan War (see also Trojan War ).