“Throughout wide Troy I see no friendly eye,
And Trojans shudder as I pass them by.”
But this feeling, we must remember, arose much more from her being the cause of all the miseries of the siege, than from her having left her Greek husband. Priam and Hector—who have certainly not a lower morality, and a higher nobility and unselfishness, than the mass of their countrymen—show no such feeling against her; on the contrary, they treat her with scrupulous delicacy and consideration. So also the leaders of the Greek forces betray no consciousness that they are fighting, after all, for a worthless woman; rather, she is a prize to be reclaimed, and Menelaus himself is ready from the first to receive her back again. How is this? Some have understood the poet to represent her abduction from her home to have been forcible—that she was carried off by Paris entirely against her will; but even allowing this (which is not consistent with many passages in the poem), it would not excuse or palliate her voluntary acceptance of such a degraded position throughout the subsequent story. The real explanation is given in a few words by Priam in the scene before us.
“Not thee I blame,
But to the gods I owe this woful war.”
In Homer’s sight, as in Priam’s, she is the victim of Venus. She is “the victim of passion,” only in a more literal and personal sense than we use the expression. Love, lawful or unlawful, was a divine—that is, a supernatural—force, to the mind of the poet. The spells of Venus are irresistible: that fatal gift of beauty is the right by which the goddess takes possession of her, and leads her captive at her evil will. Helen herself feels her own degradation far more deeply, in fact, than any one else seems to feel it; no one uses any expressions about her half so bitter as those which she applies to herself; “shameless,” “bringer of sorrow,” “whose name shall be a by-word and a reproach,” are the terms she uses—
“Oh that the day my mother gave me birth,
Some storm had on the mountains cast me forth!”
We must judge Homer’s characters with reference to the light of his religious creed—if creed it were—or at least with reference to the supernatural element employed in the Iliad. We shall be safe, then, in seeing Helen through Homer’s eyes. We separate her unconsciously, as he does, from her fault. Look upon that as the poet does, as she does herself, as Priam and Hector and Menelaus do, as her fate, her misfortune, the weird that she has been doomed to dree,—and then, what a graceful womanly character remains! Gentle and daughterlike to the aged Priam, humble and tearful in the presence of her noble and generous brother-in-law Hector, as disdainful as she dares to be to her ignoble lord and lover,—tender, respectful, regretful, towards the gallant husband she has deserted.
So she comes in all her grace and beauty, and takes her seat by the old King’s side upon the watch-tower, looking out upon the camp of the Greeks. He bids her tell him the names of such of the kings and chiefs as she can recognise. One there is who seems indeed a “king of men,” by the grace of nature. There are taller warriors in the host; but none of such majestic mien and right royal bearing. It is, indeed, Agamemnon the son of Atreus, as Helen informs him,—
“Wide-reigning, mighty monarch, ruler good,
And valiant warrior; in my husband’s name,
Lost as I am, I called him brother once.”
Another chief attracts Priam’s attention, as he strides along in front of the lines. Less in stature than Agamemnon, he is broader in the chest and shoulders. Helen knows him well. It is Ulysses, son of Laertes, “the man of many wiles;” nursed among the rugged cliffs of his island kingdom of Ithaca, but already a traveller well versed in the ways of men, the stratagems of war, and the counsels of princes. He is recognised, too, now that Helen names him, by some of the Trojan elders; for he, it must be remembered (and Homer assumes that we know it), had accompanied Menelaus in the embassy to demand Helen’s restitution. Old Antenor, now sitting by Priam’s side, well remembers the remarkable stranger, whom he had lodged and entertained as a public guest. The picture he draws of him is one of the most graphic and individual of all Homer’s characters.
“For hither when on thine account to treat,
Brave Menelaus and Ulysses came,
I lodged them in my house, and loved them both,
And studied well the form and mind of each.
As they with Trojans mixed in social guise,
When both were standing, o’er his comrade high
With broad-set shoulders Menelaus stood:
Seated, Ulysses was the nobler form:
Then, in the great assembly, when to all
Their public speech and argument they framed,
In fluent language Menelaus spoke,
In words though few, yet clear; though young in years,
No wordy babbler, wasteful of his speech:
But when the skilled Ulysses rose to speak,
With downcast visage would he stand, his eyes
Bent on the ground; the staff he bore, nor back
He waved, nor forward, but like one untaught,
He held it motionless; who only saw,
Would say that he was mad, or void of sense:
But when his chest its deep-toned voice sent forth,
With words that fell like flakes of wintry snow,
No mortal with Ulysses could compare;
Then, little recked we of his outward show.” (D.)