With all her charms imprest:
But vain th' ideal scene that smiles
With rapt'rous love and warm delight;
Vain his fond hopes; his eager arms
The fleeting form beguiles,
On sleep's quick pinions passing light."
Æschylus is not the only one of the early dramatists to whom Helen furnished a worthy theme; the titles of four lost plays show that Sophocles wrote of the Argive queen. There is no means of knowing, however, how this master dealt with the romance. Judging from his treatment of the Antigone legend, it is probable that Sophocles treated Helen as a woman of rare beauty and power, more sinned against than sinning, and subjected her character to the most profound analysis.
While Æschylus deprived Helen of something of the delicacy and charm with which Homer had invested her, Euripides, in a number of his plays, goes even further, and brings her down to the level of common life. Upon her beautiful head were heaped the reproaches of the unfortunate maidens and matrons of Greece and Troy for the woes they had to suffer, and we must not always take the sentiments of a Hecuba or a Clytemnestra as expressing the poet's own convictions. In the Daughters of Troy, he represents her in violent debate with her mother-in-law, Hecuba, before Menelaus, leaving with the reader the impression that she is a guilty, wilful woman of ignoble traits, and in other plays he lays on her the load of guilt for all the dire consequences of her act; yet in his treatment of Helen there is always an ethereal element, hard to define, but recognizable. She causes ruin and destruction, she is roundly abused and reproached, yet she herself does not deal in invective and is proof against all physical ill, being finally deified as the daughter of Zeus, while suffering is invariably the fate of those who abuse and censure her. And, like Stesichorus, Euripides in his old age makes a recantation. In the Helen, he follows the Stesichorean version, and dramatizes the legend that, after she was promised to Paris by Aphrodite, Hera in revenge fashioned like to Queen Helen a breathing phantom out of cloud land wrought for Priam's princely son; while Hermes caught her away and transferred her to the halls of Proteus, King of Egypt, to keep her pure for Menelaus. Thus it was for a phantom Helen that Greek and Trojan fought at Troy; while the real Helen passed her days amid the palm gardens of Egypt, eagerly awaiting the return of Menelaus, and bewailing her ill name, though she was clean of sin. After the war, she is happily reunited with her lord.
It is hard, however, to besmirch a conception of ideal beauty, and later writers, casting aside the imputations of the dramatists, returned to the Homeric type. The Greek rhetoricians found in Helen a fruitful subject for panegyric, and made her synonymous with the Greek ideal of beauty and feminine perfection. Isocrates praises her as the incarnation of ideal loveliness and grace; beauty is all powerful, he says, and the Helen legend shows how beauty is the most desirable of all human gifts. Theocritus, in his exquisite Epithalamium, pays an unalloyed tribute to her beauty and goodness. She is "peerless among all Achæan women that walk the earth;--rose-red Helen, the glory of Lacedæmon;--no one is so gifted as she in goodly handiwork;--yea, and of a truth, none other smites the lyre, hymning Artemis and broad-breasted Athena, with such skill as Helen, within whose eyes dwell all the Loves."
Quintus Smyrnæus, of the fourth century of our era, who wrote a Post-Homerica, emphasizes the demonic influence that controlled the fate of Helen, and lays her frailty to the charge of Aphrodite. He gives a beautiful picture of the queen as she is being led to the ships of the Achæans: "Now, Helen lamented not, but shame dwelt in her dark eyes and reddened her lovely cheeks ... while round her the people marvelled as they beheld the flawless grace and winsome beauty of the woman, and none dared upbraid her with secret taunt or open rebuke. Nay, as she had been a goddess, they beheld her gladly, for dear and desired was she in their sight."