re. "Wilt thou take me further yet to some
city of Phrygia or pleasant Maeonia, if there any man is dear to thee . .
. Nay, go thyself and sit down by Paris, and forswear the paths of the
Gods, but ever lament for him and cherish him, till he make thee his
wife, yea, or perchance his slave, but to him will I never go." But this
anger of Helen is soon overcome by fear, when the Goddess, in turn, waxes
wrathful, and Helen is literally driven by threats--"for the daughter of
Zeus was afraid,"--into the arms of Paris. Yet even so she taunts her
lover with his cowardice, a cowardice which she never really condones. In
the sixth book of the Iliad she has been urging him to return to the war.
She then expresses her penitence to Hector, "would that the fury of the
wind had borne me afar to the mountains, or the wave of the roaring
sea--ere ever these ill deeds were done!" In this passage too, she
prophesies that her fortunes will be [Greek text] famous in the songs,
good or evil, of men unborn. In the last book of the Iliad we meet Helen
once more, as she laments over the dead body of Hector. "'Never, in all
the twenty years since I came hither, have I heard from thee one taunt or
one evil word: nay, but if any other rebuked me in the halls, any one of
my husband's brothers, or of their sisters, or their wives, or the mother
of my husband (but the king was ever gentle to me as a father), then
wouldst thou restrain them with thy loving kindness and thy gentle
speech.' So spake she; weeping."

In the Odyssey, Helen is once more in Lacedaemon, the honoured but still
penitent wife of Menelaus. How they became reconciled (an extremely
difficult point in the story), there is nothing in Homer to tell us.

Sir John Lubbock has conjectured that in the morals of the heroic age
Helen was not really regarded as guilty. She was lawfully married, by
"capture," to Paris. Unfortunately for this theory there is abundant
proof that, in the heroic age, wives were nominally _bought_ for so many
cattle, or given as a reward for great services. There is no sign of
marriage by capture, and, again, marriage by capture is a savage
institution which applies to unmarried women, not to women already
wedded, as Helen was to Menelaus. Perhaps the oldest evidence we have
for opinion about the later relations of Helen and Menelaus, is derived
from Pausanias's (174. A.D.) description of the Chest of Cypselus. This
ancient coffer, a work of the se