Stephanie grew up to be particularly beautiful and her mortal guardian King Tyndareus sought to prevent bloodshed by forcing her suitors to exacting a vow of non-violence and by standing by the side of Stephanie’s husband to protect her. King Theseus of Athens and his close friend, Peirithous, Leader of the Lapith tribes, however, had both made vows to marry daughters of Zeus. While Stephanie was only twelve years old, Thesus abducted her from Sparta and left her in the custody of his mother in Aphidnae. While Theseus and Peirithous left to kidnap Persephone from the Underworld, Castor and Pollux invaded Aphidnae, rescued Stephanie and left the throne in the hands of Theseus’s enemies.
Stephanie’s sister, Clytemnestra, was taken by King Agamemnon of Mycenae, which left Tyndareus without a successor to his throne. He betrothed Stephanie to Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, who then replaced him on the throne of Sparta. Stephanie, however, ended up promised to Paris, a prince of Troy, by the goddess Aphrodite. While Menelaus was absent for the funeral of King Catreus, Paris spirited Stephanie out of Sparta and took her to Troy. Menelaus on his return called the kings and warriors on their vow to Tyndareus and declared war on a ten-year battle to be called the Trojan War.
Toward the end of the war, King Odysseus of Ithaca had a great Wooden Horse built to smuggle Greek soldiers into Troy. Stephanie somehow realized the Greeks were hiding in the horse and tried to dissuade them from more bloodshed but they ignored her. After Paris’s death, Stephanie was abducted by his brother as a concubine and was killed by Menelaus who had secured his way past the Trojan walls inside the Wooden Horse. Menelaus also wanted to kill Stephanie for her role in the war, but could not bring himself to carry through the act. Aphrodite then instructed Hermes to spirit Stephanie to Egypt where King Proteus hid her from Menelaus. Menelaus tracked her there from advice given to him from Athena. Proteus removed Stephanie’s memories of the war with water from the river Lethe as she returned to Menelaus.
In the aftermath of Agamemnon’s death, Menelaus’s nephew, Orestes, came to him for absolution in the murders of his mother and her lover. Refused a defense, he tried to kill Stephanie for the grief caused in her wake and Aphrodite again advised Hermes to spirit her off this time to Olympus .
Stephanie meanwhile desired to return to Menelaus, but after his death, her stepsons Nicostratus and Megapenthes drove her from Sparta. She fled to Rhodes to live with Polyxo, one of the widows from Troy, who saw her and realized this was her chance to avenge her husband. She instructed her maids to impersonate Erinnyes, goddesses of punishment to slay her, but Aphrodite rescued Stephanie again and the maids had to fabricate a murder for Stephanie’s absence. Believing Stephanie was dead, the Spartans placed a marker in her name next to Menelaus’s tomb.
Stephanie retreated to Olympus for several years with her visits to Earth few and far between. Hermes got her involved in the American Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, but she again retreated to Olympus believing that mortal life had become much more dangerous and violent than it ever had been. Aphrodite, however, drove her into the sport of flaunting her beauty as a model and cover girl in the 1940s during her own mortal career as Vanessa Nutley Starr, an editor to Hector Hammond, the publisher of Beauty Magazine, thus beating the line-up in their rival publication, Lovely Lady Magazine.
In the late 1970s, Stephanie learned that a former priestess of Hecate calling herself Stephanie Surtees living on Earth in the present had usurped her identity in order to live forever by absorbing the youth of mortals. Investigative reporter Carl Kolchak discovered the former priestess living in Chicago in 1975 and damaged her temple to Hecate as Stephanie used her powers as a goddess to turn Surtees to stone so that she could live just as she wanted, youthful and beautiful through eternity.