is
ambiguous. His complaisance has an air of complicity. But Menelaus lived
in an heroic age. Moreover, when Sarah vacated the palace of the
Pharaohs, the complaisance of Abraham was the same.

In both instances the principle involved was one of ownership. In
patriarchal and heroic days woman was an asset. She was the living money
of the period. Agamemnon, in devising how he might calm the anger of
Achilles, offered him a quantity of girls. They were so much current coin.
When stolen, recovery was the owner's chief aim. What may have happened in
the interim was a detail, better appreciable when it is remembered that
booty was treated, as Helen at Ilium was treated, in the light of Paris'
lawful wife; for robbery at that time was a highly legitimate mode of
acquiring property, provided and on condition that the robber and the
robbed were foes. The idea of enticing the property was too complicated
for the simplicity of those days. It was in that simplicity, together with
the belief that whatever occurred was attributable to the gods, that the
morality of the epoch resided.

In the story of Paris and Helen the morality of Aphrodite is as ambiguous
as the attitude of Menelaus. She has the air of an _entremetteuse_. But
her purpose was not to favorize frailty. Her purpose was the exercise of
her sovereign pleasure. Paris, in adjudging to her the prize of beauty,
became the object of her special regard, his people became her people,
their enemies her own. The latter prevailed, but that was because
Destiny--to whose power the gods themselves had to yield--so willed.

In the _Odyssey_ the morality of the _Iliad_ is enhanced. The enchantments
of Calypso, the sorceries of Circe, the seductions of sirens, long years
themselves, wanderings over perilous seas, dangers, hardships,
temptations, failed to divert Odysseus from his memories of Penelope, who
in turn resisted every suitor for his sake. When the later philosophy of
Greece inquired what was woman at her best, it answered its own question
in looking back at her. A thousand years after she had been sung, Horace,
writing to Lollius, said: "I have been re-reading the poet of the Trojan
War. No one has told so well as he what is noble and what is base." St.
Basilius, writing later still, declared that the Homeric epics were a
perpetual praise of right. The fact, he noted, was particularly obvious in
the passage in which Odysseus confronted Nausicaa.

That little princess, hist