The Model for All the Sirens of the Centuries: Helen of Troy
Mademoiselle Cocyle as Helen of Troy in La Belle Helene by Henri de Toulouse–Lautrec.
BY
Albert Payson Terhune
A short story from
SUPERWOMEN
1916
Introduction
Helen of Troy is one of the most famous figures of ancient Greek mythology and literature. She was believed to be the daughter of Zeus and Leda, and the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. However, she is perhaps best known for her role in the Trojan War, which was fought between the Greeks and Trojans over her abduction by the Trojan prince, Paris.
The story of Helen of Troy has fascinated historians and scholars for centuries, and many theories have been proposed about her historical existence and the events surrounding the Trojan War. Some historians believe that Helen was a real person, while others argue that she was a mythical figure created to symbolize the ideal of feminine beauty and virtue.
Despite the debate over her historical existence, the story of Helen of Troy has had a profound impact on Western culture and literature. Her beauty and the tragic events that surround her have inspired countless works of art, including paintings, sculptures, and poems. The ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poem, the Iliad, tells the story of the Trojan War and features Helen as a central figure.
The Model for All the Sirens of the Centuries: Helen of Troy
Some wise folk say she never existed. But, for that matter, some wise folk also say that her press agent, Homer, never existed, and that his "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were compilations of lesser men's writings. As well say that Napoleon was a "compilation" of his marshals.
Some aver that she indeed walked the earth, a Wonder Woman, and that her charm perhaps stirred up strife among nations, but that her fame kept on growing after she was dead, until—even as hundreds of jokes were attributed to Joe Miller that Joe never perpetrated or even heard—people got to making her the heroine of a myriad impossible deeds and adventures that no one woman or no ten women could have achieved.
Still others declare that she and her story were allegorical, standing for feminine charm and for its fatal power; that she embodied the Greek idea of superwoman perfection. The same sort of people gravely tell us that Hercules and Crœsus and William Tell were "solar myths"—whatever that may mean—and their descendants will put the myth brand, ten thousand years hence, on Napoleon, Roosevelt, John L. Sullivan, and Lydia Pinkham.
While common sense may balk at the tale of Helen of Troy, common sense would as readily balk at a narrative of the high cost of living or of the All-Europe War. And what is common sense among friends? I am going to tell Helen's story as if it were gospel truth. For all I know, it may be. I am not going to draw on a dull imagination for any of it, but to take it entirely from a dozen of the olden authorities, from Homer down. After all, since we believe in Santa Claus, why not in Helen of Troy?
(I cannot help feeling a little thrill of pride in this preamble. In spots, it is almost scholarly. And so to the story.)
She was the daughter of Tyndareus of Argos, one of the horde of kinglets who split up the Greek archipelago among them. She lived three thousand years ago. And so adorable was she that some one started a rumor that she was not the daughter of Tyndareus, but of great Jove himself. This kind of talk passed as complimentary in those benighted days. Wherefore, Helen's parents did not start a suit for criminal libel against the flatterer, but heaped honors on him.
By the time Helen reached young womanhood, she was the wonder of all Greece. She was tall, slender, and red-haired. In a day of almost universal dowdiness, she knew how to wear her clothes—although she did not use that knowledge to any prodigal extent; clothes, in balmy prehistoric Greece, being used for adornment rather than as coverings.
Her wit and her subtle magnetism vied with her good looks. Suitors came from one end of the archipelago to the other to visit the palace of Tyndareus and to pay court to the Wonder Girl. They were a goodly throng, these suitors; kings one and all, even though most of their kingdoms were smaller than Delaware. Here are a few names culled from the endless list:
Ulysses, craftiest of Greeks, a short-legged man, with the upper body of a giant; Agamemnon, overlord of all Greece, titular King of Mycenæ, a hot-tempered, long-winded potentate; Menelaus of Sparta, Agamemnon's brother, an honest, not overbright, kind-hearted chap, who loved sport better than statesmanship; Nestor, the wisest of men, (yet old enough to have known better than to come a-courting, for already his hair and beard were white); the two Ajaxes, thickheads both, one of whom was later to crown a silly life by defying Jove's lightning to mortal combat; Diomed, champion heavyweight battler of his century; Achilles, fiery demigod and prehistoric matinee hero; these and many another.
Now, in that benighted age, kings had a way of gratifying personal grudges by declaring war on their fellow sovereigns. Tyndareus was a shrewd old fellow. Also, he was fond of his glorious daughter, and he wanted to save her and her future husband from possible misfortune. So, before he allowed Helen to make her choice he bound each and all of the suitors to the following solemn oath: That they would not only abide peacefully by Helen's decision, but would pledge themselves to fight to the death in behalf of the contest's winner if, at any future time, his domestic peace should be threatened, or his wife stolen from him.
This pledge was not as fanciful as it may seem. For, cave-man tactics of "wooing by capture" were still more or less in vogue. A man who fell in love with another's wife was wont to kidnap her and to defy her bereft spouse to get her back.
Thus, Tyndareus was not only preventing civil war in Greece, but he was making it prohibitively perilous for any outsider to try to win Helen. Such a wooer would find himself at odds with practically every country in the whole archipelago. Yes, decidedly Tyndareus knew what he was about. He was assuring his daughter—as far as was humanly possible—a safe married life.
All the royal suitors—being very much in love—were in a condition to promise anything. They bound themselves, right willingly, to the oath Tyndareus exacted; even Nestor, who, as I think I said, was old and wise enough to have known better. It is a supreme tribute to Helen's glory that the wisest man alive should have behaved just as foolishly over her as did the osseous-brained Ajax Telemon.
The oath being taken, Helen's choice was made known. And, out of the ruck of greater and richer and handsomer men, she chose the plodding Menelaus, King of Sparta.
There were black looks, there were highly unstoical gusts of anger—but the disappointed suitors made the best of their bad luck. After consoling themselves by getting gloriously drunk at the marriage feast, they called it a day, and went home; not one of them realizing how fearfully his lovelorn oath was one day to bind him. And the golden Helen departed for the prim little, grim little kingdom of Sparta with her liege lord, Menelaus.
The years drifted on, lazily, happily, in humdrum fashion. If Menelaus were not inspiring as a husband, he was at least pleasanter to live with than a cleverer man might have been. He and Helen had one child, a daughter, Hermione.
Placid years make sweet living, but poor telling. So let us get along to the day when heralds from the port of Pylos brought news of a strange prince's arrival on the Spartan shores. The messengers knew not who the stranger might be, nor whence he came. But, from his retinue and dress and bearing, they judged him worthy to be a guest of honor. So a gorgeous guard was sent to escort him to the palace, and great preparations were made there to receive him.
The event seems to warrant a more Homeric wealth of language than I can compass, but it would be hard not to drop into semi-stately—not to say semi-Homeric and wholly plagiaristic—diction over it. So bear with me. It won't last long.
Adown the dry white road that ran to Pylos through the plain, a dust cloud was advancing; shields of bronze and weapons gleaming through it, here and there, with glimpses of purple robes. In the palace, tables were set out, with fair linen on them. Meats were brought forth, with rare wine from the Ismarian vineyards to the north. A votive heifer was driven in, lowing, from the fields, for the guest sacrifice. Her horns were soon sheathed with gold; then the ax-man felled and killed her with a single blow. She was quartered, and her fat was laid on the fire, along with barley grain. And the savor of the sacrifice rose, grateful, to high Olympus.
Now, through the yellow dust cloud, chariots were to be seen. A hardy band of mariners plodded beside the wheels and behind. They were bronzed and clear-eyed, these sea rovers, beguiling the journey with gay speech and with deep, mighty laughs. And they shouted, instead of speaking as do landfolk.
In the foremost chariot rode two men. One was King Diocles of Pherae. The other was the goodliest man mortal eye ever looked upon. A mane of fine-spun golden hair fell over the shoulders of his Sidonian robe; his face was like the sunshine, and his eyes were filled with the gladness of living. He was Paris, son of King Priam, and a prince of Troy. And his right hand gripped a shadow-casting spear.
In the banquet hall, when the visitors and their host were seated, appeared Helen, the wife of Menelaus, with her little daughter, Hermione. When the cries of hunger and of thirst had died down, Helen addressed the strangers, asking no direct question—since to question a guest were discourteous—but saying that mayhap they would deign to explain who they were, and why they had come hither.
Then arose Paris, standing by the board, facing the golden Helen. And he spoke winged words:
It was prophesied at his birth, he began, that he would one day be the ruin of Troy. To prevent his living to fulfill his ordained fate, his father, King Priam—weeping at the deed's black necessity—had him borne to the lonely top of Mount Ida, there to die of exposure, or at the fangs of wild beasts. But a great she-bear, roaming the mountain crest, found the babe and brought him down to her cave, and there laid him among her own soft-coated young. Here he was found one day by herdsmen, among whom he grew up.
In time he owned a herd. The best-loved of his cattle was a white bull, called The Star. Now it came to pass that King Priam, urged on by a dream, sent his slaves to Mount Ida's slopes to secure the finest bull that grazed there, for a sacrifice to Neptune. The slaves came upon The Star and drove him away with them. Paris gave chase, but in vain. Then he hastened to the city of Troy to beg redress from the king. And as he entered the outer gates of Priam's palace, his own sister, Cassandra, recognized him.
Cassandra was a prophetess. Apollo had loved her, and, as a love gift, had endowed her with a gift of foretelling all things. But when she rejected his suit, he willed that while she might still retain the gift of prophecy, her forecasts should never be believed. So now her words were laughed to scorn.
But Priam questioned the mountaineer. And, by the resemblance the youth bore to his father, and the ring that he still wore around his neck, where it had been placed when he had been taken up into the mountain as an infant, the king at last knew him. Great was his joy.
And so, elevated to his rightful princely station, Paris passed the next few years, no longer in the harsh toil and on the poor fare of a herder, but as a king's son; wholly forgetting Œnone, the forest girl of Mount Ida whom he had wooed and won and deserted, and whom he to-day mentioned merely in the pride of a past conquest.
Now, breaking in upon Paris' somewhat long-winded story of his life, let us come to the real reason of his presence in Sparta. The Goddess of Strife had tried to enliven things in peaceful Olympus by tossing down in front of Venus and Juno and Minerva a golden apple. On the apple's rind was graven the inscription:
"For the most beautiful."
Straightway, the three goddesses, who had been tolerably good friends, fell to quarreling as to which should have the apple of gold. And they compromised by leaving the decision to Paris. Every member of the trio tried secretly to bribe him; Juno offering him power, Minerva offering him wisdom, Venus promising him love—the love of the fairest woman on earth. Being very young and very human, Paris chose Love; casting aside all hope of power and of wisdom to gain it. And Venus bade him sail forth in search of the Wonder Woman she had promised him. He had departed on this Quest of the Golden Girl, and fate had led him to Helen.
I am not going to touch on the mythological part of Helen's career, more than I can help. But I protest most solemnly that the foregoing tale of Paris and the three goddesses is not mythology, but absolute truth. It may never have happened; indeed, it could not have happened, but it is truth, none the less. If you doubt that a silly apple could cause such strife among three erstwhile friendly deities and stir up unending enmity and discord and hatred, just remember that the apple was of gold. Wait until the family estate is divided among the heirs—the heirs who have hitherto been such good friends—and watch what the Golden Apple of Discord can do to breed hate and dissensions.
Those old Greeks were wise, even in their myths. They knew human nature. And human nature's sole change since their day is the substitution of conventionality for simplicity. At heart, there is no difference.
Take, too, Paris' choice of love, rather than of wisdom or of power. When we read about that, as children, we said smugly: "What a fool Paris was!" Then, as we grew older—Well, if Paris was a fool, just note in what goodly company he stands. His compeers in the same divine idiocy are such immortals as Mark Antony, Marie Stuart, Francis I., almost the whole Bourbon dynasty, Sappho, Cleopatra, Solomon, and a sheaf of other shimmeringly splendid sinners. They were monomaniacs, all of them, and they sold their birthright of decency for a mess of ambrosia; too blinded to know or care how much they were losing, and for how barren a price. Wherein, their particular brand of insanity gives them full right and privilege to claim, kinship with the Gadarene swine of Holy Writ.
Well, then, Paris had quested forth to find and win the most beautiful of women. And he found her—at the banquet board of her spouse, Menelaus, King of Sparta.
Long he abode, an honored and trusted guest in his host's palace. And Menelaus suspected nothing, not even that a man of godlike beauty and comfortable dearth of morals was a dangerous visitor in the home of a plodding, middle-aged husband.
One night—while Menelaus snored peacefully in preparation for a boar hunt he had planned for the next day—Paris and Helen stole forth together in the darkness and sped, hand in hand, to Pylos, where the lover's ship was in waiting. In his own arms, Paris bore his inamorata from shore to deck. Away across the wine-hued Ægean fled the lovers, to Troy. There they were wed; regardless of the fact that Helen had left a perfectly good husband alive in Greece. The laws against bigamy—if there were any at that day—do not seem to have been very rigidly enforced; nor do those laws' fracturers appear to have lost caste thereby.
Mind you, Helen was no love-sick girl to be swept off her feet by an impetuous wooer with spun-gold hair and a Romeo manner. When Paris stole her from Menelaus and married her, she was forty years old. But, like Ninon de Lenclos and Diane de Poictiers and other of the world's true super-women, age had no power to mar her. Father Time could not pass a face like hers without pausing to kiss it; but the kiss was very tender and loving, and it left in its wake no wrinkles or telltale lines. Helen was ageless.
Ilium worshipped beauty, even as did Greece. And the Trojans, from old Priam down, hailed their new princess with rapture; all save Cassandra, that daughter of Priam who was blest by the gift of prophecy and cursed by the incredulity of all who heard her. At sight of Helen, Cassandra shrieked aloud:
"Trojans, you nurse to your hearts a snake that shall sting you to death! You cherish a firebrand that shall burn our city to the dust!"
And she fell, writhing and foaming, at Helen's feet. But folk laughed at the forecast, and the cheers of welcome drowned the wail of the seeress.
So did Argive Helen come to her husband's people. And thus did her beauty win all hearts. Paris adored her wildly, uncontrollably, to the hour of his death. Her passing infatuation for him soon cooled into contemptuous toleration. And for the second time in her life she learned that a husband is merely what is left of a lover after the nerve has been extracted.
Meantime, Greece was humming like a kicked hornet's nest. Menelaus learned of his wife's flight, and with whom she had fled. He went, heart-broken, to his brother Agamemnon for help in avenging his wrongs. Agamemnon not only reminded him of the other suitors' promise to defend the honor of the man whom Helen should marry, but volunteered, as overlord of Greece, to force them to keep their vows.
Now, this offer was none too easy to carry out. It is one thing to make the maddest pledge, under the drunkenness of love. It is quite another thing to fulfill that pledge when love is dead. The swain who at twenty declares to a girl: "If ever you want me, say the word, and I swear I will come to you, from the ends of the earth!" would be horribly embarrassed if, as a sedate husband and father at forty, that same half-forgotten sweetheart should hold him to his calf-love oath.
So it was with Helen's suitors-emeritus. Long ago they had loved her. She had married some one else. And, during the past twenty years, other interests in their lives had crowded out her memory. If they thought of her at all, it was, now and then, to court domestic tempests by mentally or verbally comparing her golden loveliness and eternal youth with their own wives' dumpy, or slatlike, matronly aspect.
For they had wives, most of them, by this time, wives and children. Just stop for an instant, husbands all, and figure to yourselves what would happen if you should come home to-morrow night and break to your wives the tidings that you were about to go to war—for the sake of another woman! A woman, moreover, whom you had once adored, and whose memory had ever stood, wistful, winsome, wraithlike, between your wives and you.
So, when Agamemnon's fiat went forth that those long-dead promises were to be redeemed at once, there were home scenes throughout Greece whose bare recital would forever have crushed the spirit of Mormonism. War must have seemed almost a relief to some of those luckless husbands after they had finished listening to their wives' remarks on the subject. For, of all overdue debts in this world of varied indebtedness, the hardest by a million-fold to pay are the sight drafts of defunct sentiment.
These olden heroes were not especially heroic in the crisis that threatened them, and none but a single man will be unduly harsh with them for their reluctance. One after another, they sought to dodge the fulfillment of their pledges.
Ulysses, for example, after an interview with his embarrassingly faithful wife, Penelope—she has always reminded me of Mrs. Micawber—harnessed oxen to a plow and proceeded to give the impression that he had suddenly gone crazy, by plowing furrows in the salt sands of the seashore. Those whose minds had fled were supposed to be directly under divine protection, and naturally such people were never called upon to fight or to meet any other obligation.
Truly, Ulysses was living up to his reputation as the craftiest of the Greeks. Yet his craft was put to naught by the wisdom of old Nestor—one of the few suitors who had not tried to crawl out of his agreement. Nestor placed Ulysses' baby son, Telemachus, on the seashore, in the path of the advancing oxen. Ulysses turned the beasts aside to keep them from trampling the child to death. Whereat, it was decided that Ulysses was not insane—at least, not too insane to do his share of fighting—and he was enrolled as one of the chiefs of the Grecian host.
Having been caught, Ulysses set out, morbidly, to get even with Destiny by catching others. And he, as well as Nestor, began to strip away the subterfuges of the reluctant kings. Achilles, for instance, tried to escape military service by dressing as a girl and hiding among the women of his household. Ulysses, disguised as a peddler, visited these women, carrying a basket full of feminine gewgaws. At the bottom of the basket lay a magnificent sword. While the women were examining the jewelry and clothing in the peddler's stock, Achilles caught sight of the sword. For the first time, he showed interest in the intruder's visit. Paying no heed to the rest of the wares, he picked up the sword and fell to examining it with a professional interest. At once, Ulysses recognized him not only as a man, but as a warrior; and the sulky Achilles was forced to join the expedition.
Day and night, throughout Greece, the smiths' hammers clinked, and the smithy fires roared. Weapons were forged; armor was repaired; army equipments were set to rights. The woods and hilltops reechoed to ax blows, as great trees were felled for ship timber. At last, twelve hundred ships lay at anchor, waiting to bear the avenging host to Troy.
All this preparation was a matter of many months, and for a long time no hint of it reached Troy. Then—first in vague rumor, and soon in form not to be doubted—came news of the Greeks' preparation for war.
By this time, Helen had ceased to be a novelty in Troy. And now men cursed her, beneath their breath, as a sorceress who was to bring war and destruction upon them. Women hated her as the cause of their men's possible death in battle. But Priam, and the noblest blest of his sons—Hector—were still her stanch champions. And, with such backing, her position in the city was at least outwardly assured.
Then came a minor tragedy, a foreshadowing of the wholesale misfortunes that were to follow. I have said that when Paris was still a herdsman on Mount Ida, he had met and loved a forest maid, Œnone, and, on learning that he was a prince, he had promptly deserted her, leaving her to grief and loneliness. Œnone had borne Paris a son—although this was unknown to him. In the years since she had last seen the fickle prince, this son had grown up. He was known as "Corythus." When word reached Œnone of Helen's arrival in Troy, she sent her unfortunate rival a message. She wrote the message on birch bark and dispatched it, by Corythus, to the city.
Corythus arrived at the palace, and was led to Helen's bower, where he begged the princess to dismiss her maids, as he was the bearer of a word for her ears alone. Helen, obeying, received from him the folded birch bark and opened it. She read:
O thou that dost scan these lines, hast thou forgotten quite thine ancient sin, thy palace, thy husband and child—even as Paris hath forgotten me? Thou shalt not forget. For I send thee my curse, with which I shall scourge thee till I die. Soon Paris must look into the eyes of death. And little in that hour will he care for thy sweet lips, thy singing voice, thine arms of ivory, thy gold-red hair. Nay, remembering that thou hast cost his life, he will bid the folk that hate thee have their joy, and give thee to the mountain beasts to tear, or burn thy body on a tower of Troy! My son—and his—beareth this word to thee.
As she finished reading, Helen fell, in a swoon, at Corythus' feet. The youth was alarmed, and dropped on his knees beside her, lifting her head. And at that moment Paris entered the room.
Seeing a stranger kneeling beside Helen, he went wild with jealous rage. Whipping out his sword, he sprang upon Corythus, and buried the blade in the lad's neck. Then he turned, to plunge the weapon into Helen's breast. But, as he turned, he saw the birch-bark message on the floor and stooped to pick it up. Reading it, he realized what he had done, and whom, in his jealous frenzy, he had killed. He flung himself, wailing, forth from the palace and into the night.
Three days later, Corythus was laid on his funeral pyre in the market place of Troy. As Paris was advancing with the lighted torch, Œnone appeared. She leaped upon the pyre and shrieked down at her recreant lover:
"I hear the prayer that thou some day shall make in vain! Thou shalt die, and leave thy love behind thee, for another. And little shall she love thy memory! But"—turning upon the onlookers—"O ye foolish people—see! What death is coming on you from across the waters?"
At the shrieked words, all turned and looked seaward. Bearing down on the coast, in a driving rain, oar blades flashing, sails straining at their rigging, came the long-dreaded Greek fleet.
The Trojan war had begun.
For a highly sporting and poetical and altogether deathless account of that contest, I commend you to Homer's "Iliad." This is the story of Argive Helen, not an uncensored bulletin from the trenches.
For ten years the conflict waged, with varying fortunes. Again and again, as the tide of battle rolled up to the city's very walls, Helen stood on the ramparts and watched her former husband and the other men who had sworn eternal love for her, fighting and dying for her worthless sake.
Once, as she stood thus, she found at her side the group of aged men who were Priam's counselors. Gray-bearded they were, and feeble, and long past the time when love can set the pulse a-flutter, and they hated Helen with a mighty loathing for the disaster she had brought upon their dear fatherland. Even now, they had come forth upon the ramparts to berate her with her sin.
Helen turned and faced them. The afternoon sun poured down upon her white-clad form and upon her wonder face with its crown of ruddy hair. And, at sight of her, these ancient moralists forgot why they had come hither. With one voice, cried they aloud that the love of so glorious a woman were well worth the loss of Troy—aye, of all the world.
A hundred commentators have said that this tribute of the graybeards is the most supreme compliment ever paid to mortal woman's charms.
Paris was at last challenged by Menelaus to mortal combat. He accepted the challenge, but later fled, in terror, from the man he had wronged. Soon afterward, he led a sortie one night against the Greeks. A man on the outskirts of the Grecian camp gave the alarm and let fly an arrow at the advancing Trojans. The shaft struck Paris, inflicting a mortal wound.
The dying man was borne back into the city, and to the palace where the thoroughly disillusioned Helen awaited him. Since his cowardice in fleeing from Menelaus, she had taken no pains to hide her contempt for him. Now, as he lay dying, she looked down without emotion on the sharer of her crime. And Paris, seeing her bend over him, spoke the pitiful farewell that Andrew Lang's verse has made sublime, and that, even in mere prose, cannot lose all its beauty. His voice weak, his eyes glazing, he said:
"Long ago, dear, we were glad—we who never more shall be together. Will you kiss me, once? It is ten weary years since you have smiled on me. But, Helen, say farewell with your old smile!"
Helen, something of her dead tenderness coming back to her, kissed him. And, with her kiss, his life went out.
The torch was set to the unlucky prince's pyre. From the crowd around it sprang Œnone. She mounted the blazing pile of wood, and her body was consumed with that of the man who was not worth dying for.
Helen, almost at once, married Paris' younger brother Deiphobus.
One morning the Trojans awoke to find that all the Greeks had sailed away. Their huts stood abandoned on the beach, their ships were nowhere visible on the horizon. Coming back, rejoicing, to the city, the scouting party that brought this joyous news found a monstrous wooden horse. They thought that the Greeks had built it and left it there, to propitiate Neptune for a speedy and safe voyage back to their native chores.
The Trojans bore the horse within the city's walls, to keep it as a memento of the great war.
Helen, passing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest massacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept, women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were slaughtered like sheep. Then the torch was applied, and all Troy was burned to ashes.
Helen was saved from death by Ulysses, who took her to Menelaus and demanded kindly treatment for her, pleading in her behalf that she had at the last betrayed the Trojans by setting free the Greeks within the wooden horse.
There was no need for his mediation. No man could harbor wrath against the golden Helen. Menelaus, at the very first meeting of their eyes, forgave and forgot. He opened his arms and his heart to the woman who had wrecked his life and who had brought to death thousands of gallant men. Back to Greece he bore her; back to Sparta, where he installed her once more as his queen. He had first brought her hither in triumph as a mere slip of a girl, to people who had received her with pride. Now she came to Sparta again, a woman of over fifty, to a populace who cursed and reviled her. Widowed wives and weeping mothers spat at her as she passed them on the way to the palace.
But none of this was as hard to bear as had been Agamemnon's parting words—spoken in her presence—to the Greek army on the shores of Ilium. Though his brother was minded to forgive, Agamemnon was not. And to the assembled host he had shouted:
"O ye who overlong have borne the yoke, behold this woman, the very fountain of your sorrows! For her ye left your dear homes long ago, but now the black ships rot from stern to prow, and who knows if ye shall see your own again? Aye, and if homes ye win, ye yet may find—ye that the winds waft and the waters bear—that you are quite gone out of mind. Your fathers, dear and old, died dishonored there; your children deem ye dead, and will not share their lands with you; on mainland or on isle, strange men are wooing now the women you wedded. For love doth lightly beguile a woman's heart.
"These sorrows hath Helen brought on you. So fall upon her straightway, that she die, and clothe her beauty in a cloak of stone!"
The crowd had armed itself with stones as Agamemnon began to speak. But, as he denounced her, they were looking at her upturned face. And from their nerveless hands the stones fell to earth. They found her too beautiful for death.
Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:
"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"
But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.
For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at Sparta. And because the years were happy, both history and fable are silent about them, save that Menelaus was once more as slavishly enamored of his wife as in their first months together. Helen, too, was well content with this safe haven after her tempest-tossed decade—"Peace after war; port after stormy seas; rest after toil."
The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.
Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ashore, listening to the breakers; she was in their power. Her husband's protecting influence gone, she was at the mercy of his subjects; at the mercy of the merciless.
The women of Sparta banded together and, in dangerous silence, advanced upon the palace. These were the mothers, the wives, the daughters, the sweethearts, of men who had left their white bones on the Trojan seacoast, that the golden Helen might again rest snug in the shelter of Menelaus' love. There was not a doubt as to the militants' purpose. And as they drew near the palace, Helen fled. One or two slaves, still faithful to her, smuggled the fugitive out through a rear gateway and through the forests toward the seashore. There, a handful of silver bought a fisher's boat and the service of his crew.
And once more across the "wine-hued Ægean" fared the golden Helen, not this time in girlish light-heartedness to her husband's home, or, in guilty happiness, fleeing from that house by night with the man who had bewitched her, but a fugitive scourged forth from the only home she knew.
Storm-driven, her boat at last was blown ashore on the island of Rhodes. There she found she had been running toward ill fortune just as rapidly as she had thought she was running away from it. The Queen of Rhodes had lost a husband in the Trojan war. And, like every other woman on earth, she had sworn the vengeance oath against Helen. So, the story goes, when the fugitive was brought before the Rhodian queen, the latter gave a single curt order. In obedience to that fierce command, Helen was led forth and hanged; her executioners being blindfolded, that they might not balk at destroying the world's loveliest creation.
So perished the golden Helen. For her sin, she is known to fame as "Helen of Troy," not "Helen of Sparta," or even "Helen of Argos." Posterity has branded her, thus, with the name of the land she destroyed, instead of the land of her birth.
Poets and dreamers of dreams, even in her own century, have said that Helen did not die; that loveliness such as hers could not be destroyed, any more than can the smile of the springtide or the laughter of the sea. They say she escaped the Rhodians and set sail once more upon her wanderings. From shore to shore she voyaged,—ageless, divine, immortal, as eternal as Love itself. Ever, where she went, men adored her and besought her to remain among them to bless or curse their lives. But, ever, women banded together to drive her forth again upon her endless wanderings.
One legend tells of her sojourn in Egypt, and of her meeting, there, Ulysses, "sacker of cities." Penelope was dead, and Ulysses had recommenced his voyaging. He and Helen met, and the old, old love of nearly a half century earlier flared into new flame. And, as ever, Helen's love brought death in its wake. For the Sacker of Cities fell in battle within a few weeks after their reunion.
Another and more popular legend is that Helen, in return for everlasting youth, formed a highly discreditable business partnership with Satan, whereby she was to serve as his lure for the damning of men's souls. Do you recall, in Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," it was by promise of Helen's love that the devil won Faustus over to his bargain? There is a world of stark adoration in Faustus' greeting cry, as, for the first time, he beholds the enchantress:
"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"
She granted him the kiss, but no immortality; instead, his meed was damnation, like that of her million other swains.
Goethe, in the second part of his "Faust," makes her Marguerite's successor in Faust's love. And one poet after another has amplified the theory that she lives on through the ages, drawing men's souls from them.
And the poets are often right, where sane folk are wrong. The golden Helen—typifying the blind, all-engulfing love that laughs alike at reason and at destruction—lives and shall live while men are men. She lived as Cleopatra, for whom Antony deemed the world well lost. She lives as the hideously coiffured shopgirl with the debutante slouch and the blue-white powdered nose, for whom a ten-dollar-a-week clerk robs the till and goes to jail. And, as in the earliest days of her mortal wanderings, men ever stretch forth their arms to her as she passes, and beseech her to stay her flight long enough to let them damn themselves for her. And, as in those early days, women ever band together in righteous wrath to drive her forth into the darkness.
Poor Helen! Or—is it happy Helen? I think the former adjective is to be chosen. For the game she plays can end only in ultimate loss to herself. And that game's true winners, in the long run, are the very women who, fearing her spell over their loved ones, harry her forth to new wanderings. This thought should comfort them in the inevitable hour when golden Helen's shadow shall fall momentarily athwart their placid lives.
The prim path must inevitably triumph over the primrose path.
