In the case of Helen, the extreme tenderness of the colouring, that Homer has employed, multiplied infinitely the chances against its preservation. Among all the women of antiquity, she is by nature the most feminine, the finest in grain, though, as in many other instances, a certain slightness of texture is essentially connected with this fineness. Her natural softness is very greatly deepened by the double effect of her affliction and her repentance. A quiet and settled sadness broods over her whole image, and comes out not only when she weeps by the body of Hector, or when her husband’s presence reminds her of her offence, but even under the genial smiles and soothing words of old Priam on the wall. Vehement and agonizing passion draws deep strong lines, which, even in copies, may be easily caught and easily preserved; it is quite different with the profound though low-toned suffering, of which the passive influence, the penetrating tint, circulates as it were in every vein, and issues into view at every pore.
Helen of Euripides, Isocrates, Virgil.
Let us now consider how the character of Helen reappears in Euripides, in Isocrates, and in Virgil.
In the Agamemnon, Æschylus had designated her under the form of a pun, as ἑλέναυς ἑλεπτόλις; and these phrases, as they stand, cannot be said in any manner to force us beyond the limits of the Homeric tradition. But in the Hecuba she is cursed outright by the Chorus, and represented by Hecuba herself as having been the great agent, instead of the passive occasion and the suffering instrument, in the calamitous fall of Troy[1048]. In the Troades she is the shame of the country, the slayer of Priam, the willing fugitive from Sparta[1049]. Andromache denounces her in the fiercest manner, and gives her for her ancestors not Jupiter, but Death, Slaughter, Vengeance, Jealousy, and all the evils upon earth[1050]. Menelaus is furiously enraged, calls on his attendants to drag her in by her blood-guilty hair, will not give her the name of wife, will send her to Lacedæmon[1051], there herself to die as a satisfaction to those whose death she has guiltily brought about. When she asks whether she may be heard in defence of herself, he answers summarily, no:
οὐκ ἐς λόγους ἐλήλυθ’, ἀλλά σε κτενῶν[1052].
She then delivers a sophistical speech[1053], and pleads, that she could not be guilty in yielding to a passion which even Jupiter could not resist, while she retaliates abuse on Menelaus for leaving her exposed to temptation. Quantum mutata! As respects Deiphobus, however, she declares that she only yielded to force, and that she was often detected, after the death of Paris, in endeavours to escape over the wall to the Greeks.
We have moreover an example, in the Helen painted by Euripides, of the rude manner in which characters not understood, and taken to be inconsistent by an age which had failed to understand them, were torn in pieces, and how the several fragments started anew, each for itself, on the stream of tradition. In Homer we have the touching contrast between the chastity of Helen’s mind, and the unlawful condition in which she lived. The latter, taken separately, was presumed to imply an unchaste soul; the former a lawful condition. Instead therefore of the one narrative, we have two; a shade or counterfeit of Helen plays the part of the adulteress with Paris, while the true and living Helen remains concealed in Egypt, keeping pure her husband’s bed, so that, though her name has become infamous, her body may remain untainted. This latter tradition is chiefly valuable, because it marks the mode of transition from the Homeric to the spurious representations, and the consciousness of the early poets, that they were not preserving the image drawn by Homer. No scheme, however, constructed of such flimsy materials, could live; and, naturally enough, the character of Helen the wife was forgotten, that of Helen the voluptuary was preserved.
From the vituperation and disgrace of Helen in most of the plays of Euripides, we pass to the elaborate panegyric handed down to us in the Ἐγκώμιον of Isocrates. The falsehood eulogistic is not less unsatisfying than the falsehood damnatory. For now, with the lapse of time, we find a further depression of the moral standard. We have here, in its most absolute form, the deification of beauty[1054]; ὃ σεμνότατον, καὶ τιμιώτατον, καὶ θειότατον τῶν ὄντων ἔστιν[1055]. But it is totally disjoined from purity. He does not warrant and support his eulogy upon Helen, by recurring to the true Homeric representation of her; but he boldly declares the high value of sensual enjoyment[1056], commends the ambition of Paris to acquire an unrivalled possession and thereby a close affinity with the gods, and sees in the war only a proof of the immense and just estimation in which both parties held so great a treasure[1057], without the smallest scruple as to the means by which it was to be acquired or held. From this picture we may pass on to the Helen of Virgil, which represents the destructive process in its last stage of exaggeration, and leaves nothing more for the spirit of havoc to devise.
In Æn. i. 650, Helen is declared to have sought Troy and unlawful nuptials, instead of having been carried off from home against her will. In Æn. vi. 513, she is represented as having made use of the religious orgies on the fatal night, to invite the Greeks into Troy; and, after first carefully removing all weapons for defence, she is said to have opened the apartment of her sleeping husband Deiphobus to Menelaus, in the hope that, by becoming accessory to a treacherous murder, she might disarm the resentment of one whom she had so deeply wronged. But even this passage has probably done less towards occupying the modern mind with the falsified idea of Helen, than one of most extraordinary scenic grandeur in the second Æneid; where Æneas relates how he saw her, the common curse of her own country and of Troy, crouching beside the altar of Vesta, amidst the lurid flames of the final conflagration, in order to escape the wrath of Menelaus.
Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros