s and fearless
Patroclus and Achilles.

The Helen of Euripides, in the "Troades," is a pettifogging sophist, who
pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the "Helena,"
again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and adopts the
late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained in
Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the
Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of Euripides, a satirical
drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak of Helen in a strain of
coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of Isocrates on Helen may be regarded
as a kind of answer to the attacks of several speakers in the works of
the tragedians. Isocrates defends Helen simply on the plea of her
beauty: "To Heracles Zeus gave strength, to Helen beauty, which naturally
rules over even strength itself." Beauty, he declares, the Gods
themselves consider the noblest thing in the world, as the Goddesses
showed when they contended for the prize of loveliness. And so
marvellous, says Isocrates, was the beauty of Helen, that for her glory
Zeus did not spare his beloved son, Sarpedon; and Thetis saw Achilles
die, and the Dawn bewailed her Memnon. "Beauty has raised more mortals
to immortality than all the other virtues together." And that Helen is
now a Goddess, Isocrates proves by the fact that the sacrifices offered
to her in Therapnae, are such as are given, not to heroes, but to
immortal Gods.

When Rome took up the legends of Greece, she did so in no chivalrous
spirit. Few poets are less chivalrous than Virgil; no hero has less of
chivalry than his pious and tearful Aeneas. In the second book of the
Aeneid, the pious one finds Helen hiding in the shrine of Vesta, and
determines to slay "the common curse of Troy and of her own country."
There is no glory, he admits, in murdering a woman:--

Extinxisse nefas tamen et sumpsisse merentis
Laudabor poenas, animumqne explesse juvabit
Ultricis flammae, et cineres satiasse meorum.

But Venus appears and rescues the unworthy lover of Dido from the
crowning infamy which he contemplates. Hundreds of years later, Helen
found a worthier poet in Quintus Smyrnaeus, who in a late age sang the
swan-song of Greek epic minstrelsy. It is thus that (in the fourth
century A.D.) Quintus describes Helen, as she is led with the captive
women of Ilios, to the ships of the Achaeans:--"Now Helen lamented not,
but shame dwelt in her dar