In the Sixth Book, before Hector repairs to the field, he goes to the palace of Paris to summon him forth. He finds the effeminate prince handling uselessly his arms, while Helen is superintending the beautiful works of her women[1030]. By and by it appears that, sensible of the shame of her husband’s cowardice, though without interest in his fame, she has been persuading him to go forth and fight; and she takes the opportunity of Hector’s presence to offer him a chair that he may rest from his fatigues; to revile herself as, next to her husband, the cause of them; and, while grieving that she had outlived her infancy, to lament also that, if she was to live at all, she had not been united to one less impervious to the sentiment of honour.
Again, Homer has thought her not unworthy of the third place, with Andromache and Hecuba, as mourners over the mighty Hector, in the deeply touching description of the return of his remains to Troy[1031]. The tenour of this speech is kept in the exactest harmony with what has gone before.
We now bid adieu to the Helen of Homer in her sorrow and shame among the Trojans. But the Poet presents her to us again in prosperity and domestic peace, as the Queen of Menelaus; who, though not the heir of the high throne of Agamemnon, yet held a station in Greece, after the Return, of highly elevated influence. This is a picture, which it would not have been in accordance with the usual course of Homer to set before us, had his mind attached to Helen the character given to her by the later tradition; for where does he represent to us the wicked in prosperity, without bringing down on them subsequently the vengeance of heaven? But on the Helen of the Odyssey he has left no note of sorrow, except the most moving and appropriate of all, namely this, that the gods gave her no child after Hermione, the daughter of her early youth[1032].
From her stately chamber she comes forth into the hall, after the feast. She is attended by three maidens, who bear respectively the first her seat, the second its covering, the third her work-basket and distaff. She remarks on the likeness of Telemachus to Ulysses, and humbly recollects to confess, that she herself has been the cause of the sufferings of the Greeks. The allusions then made to Ulysses cause her, with the rest, to weep tenderly; and when her husband with his friends resumes the banquet, she infuses into their wine the soothing drug, supposed to have been opium, which she had obtained from Egypt, to make them forgetful of their sorrows. Then she begins to tell tales in honour of Ulysses: and how, when in his beggar’s dress he escaped scatheless from Troy, and left many of the Trojans slaughtered behind him, she alone, amidst the wailings of the women, was full of joy, for her heart had been yearning towards her home.
There is indeed a trait that deserves notice in the speech of Menelaus, which has been lately mentioned. Helen came down to detect, if possible, the Greeks concealed within the Horse: therefore, to act in the interest of the Trojans. Now if, on the one hand, she looked back on her country and her first husband with many yearnings, yet it was not to be wondered at that as a woman, nowhere pretending to the character of a heroine, she should be so far pliable to the wishes or subject to the compulsion of the Trojans—especially when we remember her love and reverence for their head, and for Hector, who had but lately died in their defence—as to make this effort to defeat the stratagem of the besiegers. But Menelaus, in referring to the incident, carefully spares Helen’s feelings by another of those strokes of exceeding tact and refinement for which Homer’s writings are so remarkable, both generally, and as to the chivalrous character of this hero in particular. ‘Thither,’ he says, that is to the Horse, ‘thou camest; and no doubt,’ he adds, ‘it was the influence of some celestial being, favourable to Troy, that prompted thee;’ thus preventing by anticipation the sting that his words might carry:
ἦλθες ἔπειτα σὺ κεῖσε· κελευσέμεναι δέ σ’ ἔμελλεν
δαίμων, ὃς Τρώεσσιν ἐβούλετο κῦδος ὀρέξαι[1033].
Her marriage to Deiphobus.