Those old Greeks were wise, even in their myths. They knew human nature. And human nature's sole change since their day is the substitution of conventionality for simplicity. At heart, there is no difference.
Take, too, Paris' choice of love, rather than of wisdom or of power. When we read about that, as children, we said smugly: "What a fool Paris was!" Then, as we grew older—Well, if Paris was a fool, just note in what goodly company he stands. His compeers in the same divine idiocy are such immortals as Mark Antony, Marie Stuart, Francis I., almost the whole Bourbon dynasty, Sappho, Cleopatra, Solomon, and a sheaf of other shimmeringly splendid sinners. They were monomaniacs, all of them, and they sold their birthright of decency for a mess of ambrosia; too blinded to know or care how much they were losing, and for how barren a price. Wherein, their particular brand of insanity gives them full right and privilege to claim, kinship with the Gadarene swine of Holy Writ.
Well, then, Paris had quested forth to find and win the most beautiful of women. And he found her—at the banquet board of her spouse, Menelaus, King of Sparta.
Long he abode, an honored and trusted guest in his host's palace. And Menelaus suspected nothing, not even that a man of godlike beauty and comfortable dearth of morals was a dangerous visitor in the home of a plodding, middle-aged husband.
One night—while Menelaus snored peacefully in preparation for a boar hunt he had planned for the next day—Paris and Helen stole forth together in the darkness and sped, hand in hand, to Pylos, where the lover's ship was in waiting. In his own arms, Paris bore his inamorata from shore to deck. Away across the wine-hued Ægean fled the lovers, to Troy. There they were wed; regardless of the fact that Helen had left a perfectly good husband alive in Greece. The laws against bigamy—if there were any at that day—do not seem to have been very rigidly enforced; nor do those laws' fracturers appear to have lost caste thereby.
Mind you, Helen was no love-sick girl to be swept off her feet by an impetuous wooer with spun-gold hair and a Romeo manner. When Paris stole her from Menelaus and married her, she was forty years old. But, like Ninon de Lenclos and Diane de Poictiers and other of the world's true super-women, age had no power to mar her. Father Time could not pass a face like hers without pausing to kiss it; but the kiss was very tender and loving, and it left in its wake no wrinkles or telltale lines. Helen was ageless.
Ilium worshipped beauty, even as did Greece. And the Trojans, from old Priam down, hailed their new princess with rapture; all save Cassandra, that daughter of Priam who was blest by the gift of prophecy and cursed by the incredulity of all who heard her. At sight of Helen, Cassandra shrieked aloud:
"Trojans, you nurse to your hearts a snake that shall sting you to death! You cherish a firebrand that shall burn our city to the dust!"
And she fell, writhing and foaming, at Helen's feet. But folk laughed at the forecast, and the cheers of welcome drowned the wail of the seeress.
So did Argive Helen come to her husband's people. And thus did her beauty win all hearts. Paris adored her wildly, uncontrollably, to the hour of his death. Her passing infatuation for him soon cooled into contemptuous toleration. And for the second time in her life she learned that a husband is merely what is left of a lover after the nerve has been extracted.