CHAPTER IV.
THE WOMEN OF HOMER.
Helen of Troy—Her Eternal Youth.—Variety of Legends connected with her.—Stesichorus.—Helen in the Iliad.—Helen in the Odyssey.—The Treatment of Helen by Æschylus.—Euripidean Handling of her Romance.—Helen in Greek Art.—Quintus Smyrnæus.—Apollonius of Tyana and the Ghost of Achilles.—Helen in the Faust Legend.—Marlowe and Goethe.—Penelope—Her Home-love.—Calypso and the Isle Ogygia.—Circe.—The Homeric and the Modern Circe.—Nausicaa—Her Perfect Girlishness.—Briseis and Andromache.—The Sense of Proportion and of Relative Distance in Homer's Pictures.—Andromache and Astyanax.—The Cult of Heroes and Heroines in Greece.—Artistic Presentation of Homeric Persons.—Philostratus.
For first of all the spherèd signs whereby
Love severs light from darkness, and most high
In the white front of January there glows
The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose.
Prelude to Tristram and Iseult, lines 91-94.
Helen of Troy is one of those ideal creatures of the fancy over which time, space, and circumstance, and moral probability exert no sway. It would be impossible to conceive of her except as inviolably beautiful and young, in spite of all her wanderings and all she suffered at the hands of Aphrodite and of men. She moves through Greek heroic legend as the desired of all men and the possessed of many. Theseus bore her away while yet a girl from Sparta. Her brethren, Castor and Polydeukes, recovered her from Athens by force, and gave to her Æthra, the mother of Theseus, for bondwoman. Then all the youths of Hellas wooed her in the young world's prime. She was at last assigned in wedlock to Menelaus, by whom she conceived her only earthly child, Hermione. Paris, by aid of Aphrodite, won her love and fled with her to Egypt and to Troy. In Troy she abode more than twenty years, and was the mate of Deiphobus after the death of Paris. When the strife raised for her sake was ended, Menelaus restored her with honor to his home in Lacedæmon. There she received Telemachus and saw her daughter mated to Neoptolemus. But even after death she rested not from the service of love. The great Achilles, who in life had loved her by hearsay, but had never seen her, clasped her among the shades upon the island Leuké, and begat Euphorion. Through all these adventures Helen maintains an ideal freshness, a mysterious virginity of soul. She is not touched by the passion she inspires, or by the wreck of empires ruined in her cause. Fate deflours her not, nor do years impair the magic of her charm. Like beauty, she belongs alike to all and none. She is not judged as wives or mothers are, though she is both; to her belong soul-wounding blossoms of inexorable love, as well as pain-healing poppy-heads of oblivion; all eyes are blinded by the adorable, incomparable grace which Aphrodite sheds around her form.[17]
Whether Helen was the slave or the beloved of Aphrodite, or whether, as Herodotus hinted, she was herself a kind of Aphrodite, we are hardly told. At one time she appears the willing servant of the goddess; at another she groans beneath her bondage. But always and on all occasions she owes everything to the Cyprian queen. Her very body-gear preserved the powerful charm with which she was invested at her birth. When the Phocians robbed the Delphian treasure-house, the wife of one of their captains took and wore Helen's necklace, whereupon she doted on a young Epirot soldier and eloped with him.
Whose daughter was Helen? The oldest legend calls her the child of Leda and of Zeus. We have all read the tale of the Swan who was her father amid the rushes of Eurotas—the tale which Leonardo and Buonarroti and Correggio thought worthy of their loveliest illustration. Another story gives her for the offspring of Oceanus and Tethys, as though, in fact, she were an Aphrodite risen from the waves. In yet a third, Zeus is her sire and Nemesis her mother; and thus the lesson of the tale of Troy was allegorized in Helen's pedigree. She is always god-begotten and divinely fair. Was it possible that anything so exquisite should have endured rough ravishment and borne the travail of the siege of Troy? This doubt possessed the later poets of the legendary age. They spun a myth according to which Helen reached the shore of Egypt on the ship of Paris; but Paris had to leave her there in cedar-scented chambers by the stream of Nile, when he went forth to plough the foam, uncomforted save by her phantom. And for a phantom the Greeks strove with the Trojans on the windy plains of Ilium. For a phantom's sake brave Hector died, and the leonine swiftness of Achilles was tamed, and Zeus bewailed Sarpedon, and Priam's towers were levelled with the ground. Helen, meanwhile—the beautiful, the inviolable—sat all day long among the palm-groves, twining lotus-flowers for her hair, and learning how to weave rare Eastern patterns in the loom. This legend hides a delicate satire upon human strife. For what do men disquiet themselves in warfare to the death, and tossing on sea-waves? Even for a phantom—for the shadow of their desire, the which remains secluded in some unapproachable, far, sacred land. A wide application may thus be given to Augustine's passionate outcry: "Quo vobis adhuc et adhuc ambulare vias difficiles et laboriosas? Non est requies ubi quæritis eam. Quærite quod quæritis; sed ibi non est ubi quæritis. Beatam vitam quæritis in regione mortis; non est illic." Those who spake ill of Helen suffered. Stesichorus had ventured in the Ἰλίου Πέρσις to lay upon her shoulders all the guilt and suffering of Hellas and of Troy. Whereupon he was smitten with blindness, nor could he recover his sight till he had written the palinode which begins:
οὐκ ἔστ' ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος,
οὐδ' ἔβας ἐν ναυσὶν εὐσέλμοις,
οὐδ' ἵκεο πέργαμα Τροίας.[18]
Even Homer, as Plato hints, knew not that blindness had fallen on him for like reason. To assail Helen with reproach was not less dangerous than to touch the Ark of the Covenant, for with the Greeks beauty was a holy thing. How perfectly beautiful she was we know from the legend of the cups modelled upon her breasts suspended in the shrine of Aphrodite. When Troy was taken, and the hungry soldiers of Odysseus roamed through the burning palaces of Priam and his sons, their swords fell beneath the vision of her loveliness. She had wrought all the ruin, yet Menelaus could not touch her, when she sailed forth, swan-like, fluttering white raiment, with the imperturbable sweet smile of a goddess on her lips. It remained for a Roman poet to describe her vile and shrinking: