HELENUS, in Greek legend, son of Priam and Hecuba, and twin-brother of Cassandra. He is said to have been originally called Scamandrius, and to have received the name of Helenus from a Thracian soothsayer who instructed him in the prophetic art. In the Iliad he is described as the prince of augurs and a brave warrior; in the Odyssey he is not mentioned at all. Various details concerning him are added by later writers. It is related that he and his sister fell asleep in the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus and that snakes came and cleansed their ears, whereby they obtained the gift of prophecy and were able to understand the language of birds. After the death of Paris, Helenus and his brother Deïphobus became rivals for the hand of Helen. Deïphobus was preferred, and Helenus withdrew in indignation to Mount Ida, where he was captured by the Greeks, whom he advised to build the wooden horse and carry off the Palladium. According to other accounts, having been made prisoner by a stratagem of Odysseus, he declared that Philoctetes must be fetched from Lemnos before Troy could be taken; or he surrendered to Diomedes and Odysseus in the temple of Apollo, whither he had fled in disgust at the sacrilegious murder of Achilles by Paris in the sanctuary. After the capture of Troy, he and his sister-in-law Andromache accompanied Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus) as captives to Epirus, where Helenus persuaded him to settle. After the death of Neoptolemus, Helenus married Andromache and became ruler of the country. He was the reputed founder of Buthrotum and Chaonia, named after a brother or companion whom he had accidentally slain while hunting. He was said to have been buried at Argos, where his tomb was shown. When Aeneas, in the course of his wanderings, reached Epirus, he was hospitably received by Helenus, who predicted his future destiny.
Homer, Iliad, vi. 76, vii. 44, xii. 94, xiii. 576; Sophocles, Philoctetes, 604, who probably follows the Little Iliad of Lesches; Pausanias i. 11, ii. 23; Conon, Narrationes, 34; Dictys Cretensis iv. 18; Virgil, Aeneid, iii. 294-490; Servius on Aeneid, ii. 166, iii. 334.
HELGAUD, or Helgaldus (d. c. 1048), French chronicler, was a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Fleury. Little else is known about him save that he was chaplain to the French king, Robert II. the Pious, whose life he wrote. This Epitoma vitae Roberti regis, which is probably part of a history of the abbey of Fleury, deals rather with the private than with the public life of the king, and its value is not great either from the literary or from the historical point of view. The only existing manuscript is in the Vatican, and the Epitoma has been printed by J. P. Migne in the Patrologia Latina, tome cxli. (Paris, 1844); and by M. Bouquet in the Recueil des historiens des Gaules, tome x. (Paris, 1760).
See Histoire littéraire de la France, tome vii. (Paris, 1865-1869); and A. Molinier, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, tome ii. (Paris, 1902).
HELGESEN, POVL,[1] Danish humanist, was born at Varberg in Halland about 1480, of a Danish father and a Swedish mother. Helgesen was educated first at the Carmelite monastery of his native place and afterwards at another monastery at Elsinore, where he devoted himself to humanistic studies and adopted Erasmus as his model. None had a keener eye for the abuses of the Church; long before the appearance of Luther, he denounced the ignorance and immorality of the clergy, and, as lector at the university of Copenhagen, gathered round him a band of young enthusiasts, the future leaders of the Danish Reformation. But Helgesen desired an orderly, methodical, rational reformation, and denounced Luther, whose ablest opponent in Denmark he subsequently became, as a hot-headed revolutionist. Christian II. was also an object of Helgesen’s detestation, and so boldly did he oppose that monarch’s measures that, to save his life, he had to flee to Jutland. Under Frederick I. (1523-1533) he returned to Copenhagen and resumed his chair at the university, becoming soon afterwards provincial of the Carmelite Order for Scandinavia. But like all moderate men in a time of crisis, Helgesen could gain the confidence of neither party, and was frequently attacked as bitterly by the Catholics as by the Protestants. From 1530 to 1533 he and the Protestant champion Hans Tausen exhausted the whole vocabulary of vituperation in their fruitless polemics. In October 1534, however, Helgesen issued an eirenicon in which he attempted to reconcile the two contending confessions. After that every trace of him is lost. For a long time he was unjustly regarded as a turn-coat, but he was too superior to the prejudices of his age to be understood by his contemporaries. His ideal was a moral internal reformation of the Church on a rational basis, conducted not by ill-informed fanatics, but by an enlightened and well-educated clergy; and from this standpoint he never diverged. Helgesen was indisputably the greatest master of style of his age in Denmark, and as a historian he also occupies a prominent position. He always endeavours to probe down to the very soul of things, though his passionate nature made it very difficult for him to be impartial. His chief works are Danmark’s Kongers Historie and Skibby Kröniken.
See Ludwig Schmitt, Der Karmeliter Paulus Heliä (Freiburg, 1893); Danmarks Riges Historie (Copenhagen, 1897-1905), vol. iii.