Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros,
Et pœnas Danaûm et deserti conjugis iras
Permetuens, Troiæ et patriæ communis Erinnys,
Abdiderat sese atque aris invisa sedebat.[19]
The morality of these lines belongs to a later age of reflection upon Greek romance. In Homer there are no such epigrams. Between the Helen of the Iliad, reverenced by the elders in the Scæan gate, and the Helen of the Odyssey, queen-like among her Spartan maidens, there has passed no agony of fear. The shame which she has truly felt has been tempered to a silent sorrow, and she has poured her grief forth beside Andromache over the corpse of Hector.
If we would fain see the ideal beauty of the early Greek imagination in a form of flesh-and-blood reality, we must follow Helen through the Homeric poems. She first appears when Iris summons her to watch the duel of Paris and Menelaus. Husband and lover are to fight beneath the walls of Troy. She, meanwhile, is weaving a purple peplus with the deeds of war done and the woes endured for her sake far and wide:
She in a moment round her shoulders flings
Robe of white lawn, and from the threshold springs,
Yearning and pale, with many a tender tear.
Also two women in her train she brings,
The large-eyed Clymené and Æthra fair,
And at the western gates right speedily they were.[20]
English eyes know well how Helen looked as she left her chamber and hastened to the gate; for has not Leighton painted her with just so much of far-off sorrow in her gaze as may become a daughter of the gods? In the gate sat Priam and his elders, and as they looked at Helen no angry curses rose to their lips, but reverential admiration filled them, together with an awful sense of the dread fate attending her:
These, seeing Helen at the tower arrive,
One to another wingèd words addressed:
"Well may the Trojans and Achæans strive,
And a long time bear sorrow and unrest,
For such a woman, in her cause and quest,
Who like immortal goddesses in face
Appeareth; yet 'twere even thus far best
In ships to send her back to her own place,
Lest a long curse she leave to us and all our race."
It is thus simply, and by no mythological suggestion of Aphrodite's influence, that Homer describes the spirit of beauty which protected Helen among the people she had brought to sore straits.
Priam accosts her tenderly; not hers the blame that the gods scourge him in his old age with war. Then he bids her sit beside him and name the Greek heroes as they march beneath. She obeys, and points out Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Ajax, describing each, as she knew them of old. But for her twin brothers she looks in vain; and the thought of them touches her with the sorrow of her isolation and her shame. In the same book, after Paris has been withdrawn, not without dishonor, from the duel by Aphrodite, Helen is summoned by her liege-mistress to his bed. Helen was standing on the walls, and the goddess, disguised as an old spinning-woman, took her by the skirt, bidding her hie back to her lover, whom she would find in his bedchamber, not as one arrayed for war, but as a fair youth resting haply from the dance. Homer gives no hint that Aphrodite is here the personified wish of Helen's own heart going forth to Paris. On the contrary, the Cyprian queen appears in the interests of the Phrygian youth, whom she would fain see comforted. Under her disguise Helen recognized Aphrodite, the terrible queen, whose bondwoman she was forced to be. For a moment she struggled against her fate. "Art thou come again," she cried, "to bear me to some son of earth beloved of thee, that I may serve his pleasure to my own shame? Nay, rather, put off divinity and be thyself his odalisque."
"With him remain,
Him sit with, and from heaven thy feet refrain;
Weep, till his wife he make thee, or fond slave.
I go to him no more, to win new stain,
And scorn of Trojan women again outbrave,
Whelmed even now with grief's illimitable wave."