and. When she was but a child she had been abducted.
Theseus took her from a temple in which she was dancing. Recovered by her
brothers, Achilles got her from them but only to cede her to Patroclus.
Later she became the wife of Menelaus. Subsequently Aphrodite gave her to
Paris. At that she rebelled. But no mortal may resist the divine. Helen
accompanied Paris to Troy, where, during the war that was waged for her,
he was killed and she remained in his brother's arms until recovered by
Menelaus.

Quintus Smyrnaeus[4] represented Menelaus, sword in hand, rushing violently
at her. A glance of her eyes disarmed him. In the clatter of the falling
sword was love's reawakening. Then presently, as an honored wife, she
returned to Lacedaemon. Even there her adventures continued. Achilles,
haunted in Hades by the memory of her beauty, escaped, and in mystic
nuptials conceived with her a winged child, Euphorion. Clearly, as the
sages thought and Priam believed, she could not have been responsible. Nor
was she so regarded. The various episodes of her career formed a sort of
sacred legend for the polluting of which a poet, Stesichorus, was blinded.
The blindness of Homer, Plato attributed to the same cause. To degrade
beauty is a perilous thing. To preserve it, to make the legend more
sacred still, it was imagined that not Helen, but a phantom of her,
accompanied Paris to Troy, and that it was for a phantom that men fought
and died.

A thousand years later Apollonius of Tyana happened on that romance.
Apollonius knew all languages, including that of silence, and all things,
save the caresses of women. He knew, too, how to summon the dead. To
verify the story, he evoked the shade that once before for Helen had
emerged from hell. Apollonius asked: "Is it true that Helen went to Troy?"
"We thought so," Achilles answered, "and we fought to get her back. But
she was actually in Egypt. When we discovered that we fought for Troy
itself."[5]

Achilles may have been right. In the _Odyssey_, in connection with Helen,
mention is made of nepenthe. Nepenthe was an Egyptian drug that dispelled
the memory of whatever is sad. Helen had much to forget and probably did,
even without assistance. She was the personification of passivity. Her
little rebellion at Aphrodite was very brief. But, assuming the nepenthe,
it has been assumed also that in it was the secret of the spell with which
she so promptly disarmed Menelaus. To modern eyes his attitude