HELEN OF TROY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2804, 11 December 1907, Page 86

HELEN OF TROY.

Br Jessie Mackat.

For three thousand years, according to the conventional chronology of the classics, Helen of Troy has remained the poets' standard of perfect grace and beauty in woman. From the days when blind Homer roamed th-i sunny vales of Hellas, singing his ocean-sounding songs out of pain, poverty, and darkness, the .name of Helen has been a charm and a battle gage, a key to the House of Dreams where love and wonder dwell. Here in our antipodean liteialness, however, and in our rapt devotion to the daily turned kaleidoscope of the press, we have no time and less mind for Helen or for Troy. There are thousands of young men and maids to whom the ■veiy words are as blank as Sanscrit. That is my excuse for a theme which, if modern comparative mythology can hold its own, is literally older than the hills, seeing that the Helen A Max Muller, Grimm, and others of that learned ilk is but the worldwide myth of the stolen light of day borne away to the caves of night and restored again the bright host who go to seek it. However tbat may be, the tales of Troy and the songs of Helen went among the ancient Greeks as truth, even as the wonder-tales of Arthur and Avilion went among the Celts of Brittany and Cornwall, and later among the Anglo-Normans. No one doubted the Troy story then, and the Virgilian myth that hailed London itself as an ancient Trojan settlement under the name of Troy Novant fitted well with the startling conceptions of liistory that the " Brut " and other readymade chronicles spread abroad in the Middle Ages.

But stay! There weie heretics even in ancient Greece, and twenty-three centuries or so past one crusty mateiialisi — Euemerus by name — was unto the devotees of his time as Tom Paine was to those of his, and unto the poets then as Mr Gradgrir.d mi^ht be to poets now. All the Bradlaughs and Clodds of , old Greece were gathered unto Enemem?, so that his 'ideas lasted on to be the scorn of Professor Blackie and the target of Mr Gladstone — both lovers of the humanised Troy tale. Eumerus humanised ton, after a fashion — humanised too much, in /act, as he reduced the glowing myths of heroic " Greece to the grey and scanty ash of historical commonplace. There might have been a fight between some Gieek invaders and some city of Asia Minor, he said in effect ; there might have been some barbaric chieftainess of the name of Helen, but a nine years' war on .|uoh a slender cause as her recovery was

| unthinkable. This was the heresy; let us now glance at the orthodoxy. Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, Qu<en of Sparta; but in the older and simpler legend of this semi-divine origin no mention is made of the swan metamori-hosis, about which so much was said or sung in later ages. Helen's brothers were the divine wrestlers, Castor and Pollux, who saved her from captivity when Theseus carried her away to Athens at the age of 10 years. A later legend also gave Helen Penelope- for a sister, Penelope's beauty being only inferior to the celestial charms of Zeus's child. Arrived at womanhood, she was beset by suitors from the noblest thrones of Greece, and being given the unusual grace of a free choice, became the wife of Menelau.*, by this time King of Sparta. Lif-e opened fair and calm ; peace, love, and honour showered blessings upon her royal estate : one fair daughter, Htrmione, was born to her and Menelaus, crowning their happinoss. Then came the blow that wrecked r ho peace of HeUas and of Ilium, as the Greeks called the fair and wealthy city that crowned the Troad on the opposite phore of Asia Minor. The wise and venerable Priam was King of Troy, or Ilium, and father of the 50 Trojan princes. But Hecuba, his queen, had dreamed an evil dream at the birth of the child Paris, and to save Ilium from the threatened destruction the fated babe was left to die on the Asiaii Mount Ida ; but it was saved precisely as Romulus and Remus were in like situation. Reared as a shepherd, the youthful prince excelled in strength, beauty, and favour. He wedded the lovely river-nynph CEnone, and in time was discovered by Priam and biought back with rejoicing to Troy. Then followed the lamentable mischief of the golden apple flung by Eris, Goddess of Discord, into a banquet hall to which she was not invited. To win the apple, with its inscription, "To the fairest," became thy ambition of each of the goddesses Hera, Pallas, and Aphrodite, and Paris was called to judge. How the award was given is the main theme of Tennyson's early poem of " CEnone." Paris put by Hera's temptation of wealth and earthly power, as well as Pallas's proffer of viisdom and military glory, but fell before Aphrodite's bribe — "the fairest and moot loving wife in Greece." Soon after Paris set sail on embassy to Peloponnesus, and fatally cros6ed the path of "Heaven-born Helen, Sparta's Queen." | The will of Aphrodite was laid on the i daughter of Zeus impelled by love or destiny, 6he fled with the Trojan prince to the "dream-built towers of Ilion," which were nevermore to know peace because of the sin of Paris. And yet the powers of Troy 'could not look upon her superb loveliness without forgiving her all, and staking the existence of their city on the chance of retaining her. For the Achaian League was formed under Agamemnon, King of Mycenae; the Greek princes who had once sued to her were now joined to Menelaus for the- express end of recovering bis faithless queen and her stolen dowry. So began the nine years' siege of Troy, in which heroes on either side performed prodigies of valour, and the Amazon goddesses mingled, veiled, in the fight, Aphrodite for Paris, Pallas adid Hera for Troy. The fiery chivlary of Hector, the wrath of Achilles, the tragedy of the Laocoon, the stratagem of the wooden horse, the sacrifice oi the maid-en Iphigenia — these and countless other tales entwined themselves in the main history of the The degenerate Paris, whose eaily ptow-ese had pas&ed so soon, was dead at last ; like Sigurd of the North, his funeral pyre had been shared by his first love, forsaken CEnone, who would not put forth her skill to save him, but also would not live without him. Then Helen, in the hour when Ilion was nodding to the fall, married Deiphobus, brother of Paris, but 6oon was parted from her little-loved new bridegroom by the capture of the city. Again her supreme beauty won her forgiveness i horn Menelaus and the princes of the ' League. While these allies of Sparta, j Agamemnon, Ulysses, and others, were I buffeted by misfortune abroad, or met at last by treachery and death in the homes they had left 10 years before, Menelaus and Holea sailed back to a long and peaceful life in Sparta. Euripides, indeed, saved Helen's - credit by a remarkable tale, according V> which she stayed in a temple in Egypt during the whole war. both Gieeks and Trojans being deceived by a cloud-shape wearing her image. Of Helen's ending, there weie diverse tal«s. Most represented her as dying in peace at home, and sharing the splendid tomb of Menelaus. Another represents her as falling on e\il days after the death of Menelaus. being driven from Sparta to the island of Rhodes, where a female enemy, Polyxo, had her bound to a tree and murdered — a sin for which the i Rhodians had to pay by erecting a. temple called by Helen's name. Again, Greek fancy, unwearied by so many variations of adventure during her .life," must needs follow her beyond the I grave, and picture her as wedded to Achilles in an islo of the other world. Of this celestial union, a child. Euphoi rion, was born. I These were the main events in the life ,of Helen. Stripped of the superuatuial, I but not of the romantic, the Troy myth was the common heritage of the Dark and, more particularly, the Middle Ages. How th-e old contentions were fanned again into a blaze so late as the nineteenth century, as well as how the leading poets have regaided Helen, we must leave for a later aiticle.

—"I suppose yon often have silly questions put to you? " said the passenger to the guard. "You may say that, sir," replied the official. " The silliest in my experience was put to me to-day. A lady asked me •whereabouts we were, and T said: 'Sixty miles from London.' 'Yes.' she said. ' hut on which *ide — this or the oilxwt ' "-