Almost with these words the poem closes, telling us nothing of the dreadful sack of Troy by the Achaians, after they had entered the city through the device of the wooden horse. Our last glimpse of Helen in the Iliad is as she wails her mournful threnos over the body of Hector.
And Helen’s sorrow brake into lament
As bursts a lake the barriers of a hill,
For lost, lost, lost was that one friend who still
Stood by her with kind speech and gentle heart.[[1]]
We hear no word of the Greek calamity in the fall of Achilles, or how Paris was slain by the arrow of the outcast Philoctetes, with perfect poetical justice. Nothing is told of the massacre of Priam and his sons; of the burning of the city; of the carrying off of its wealth and of its fair women when the Greeks, sated with revenge at last, set sail for Argos. And we hear no word of the most amazing fact of all—the reconciliation of Helen and Menelaus. We know from the Odyssey that they were reconciled, but how, Homer does not say. Legend and song have been busy with the theme, however, and the most beautiful story has been woven by Andrew Lang into his Helen of Troy. There we see how Aphrodite in the midst of the slaughter and outrage, led Helen in safety to the ships, while Menelaus raged through the city seeking her, grimly determined to give her over to the vengeance of the army.
But Helen found he never where the flame
Sprang to the roofs, and Helen ne’er he found
Where flocked the wretched women in their shame
The helpless altars of the gods around....