righteous hatred of the selfish lust which has plunged his country into a bloody war "Was it for this, or with such heart as now, O'er the wide billows with a chosen band Didst bring thy fair wife from the Apian strand, Thus for the enemy's sport, thine own confusion dread? "Lo, now thou cowerest, and wilt not abide Fierce Menelaus-thou hadst known, I ween, And they are lambs in spirit; or else hadst thou Worn, for thine evil works, a cloke of stone ere now." W. Paris has the grace to admit the justice of his brother's rebuke. Hector, he confesses, is far the better soldier; only he pleads, with a self-complacency which he never loses, that grace of person, and a smooth tongue, and a taste for music, are nothing less than the gifts of the gods-that, in fact, it is not his fault that he is so irresistible. He ends, however, with an offer which is far more to Hector's mind. Let open lists be pitched in sight of both armies, and he will engage Menelaus in single combat; Helen and her wealth shall be the prize of victory. It is a proposal at which Hector's heart rejoices. He checks at once the advancing line of the Trojans, and steps out himself to the front. The Greeks bend their bows at him, but Agamemnon understands his motions, and bids them hold their hands. It is a fair challenge which the Trojan prince comes to make on behalf of Paris. Menelaus accepts it, in a few plain and gallant words-he is no orator : "Hear now my answer; in this quarrel I May claim the chiefest share; and now I hope So let him die! the rest depart in peace." (D.) A truce is agreed upon, to abide the result of this appeal of battle. A messenger from Olympus-Iris, goddess of the Rainbow-comes to warn Helen of the impending duel. And this introduces one of the most beautiful passages in the whole Iliad, to modern taste. Its sentiment and pathos are perfectly level and quiet; but as a natural and life-like yet highly-wrought portrait of a scene in what we may call the social drama, it stands almost without equal or parallel in classical literature. Helen-the fatal cause of the war, the object of such violent passions and such bitter taunts-is sitting pensively in the palace of her royal father-in-law, writing her own miserable story. She is writing itnot in a three-volumed novel, as a lady who had a private history, more or less creditable, would write it now, but-in a golden tapestry, in which more laborious form it was in those days not unfrequent to write sensational biographies. Iris urges her to be present at the show. The whole reads like the tale of some medieval tournament, except that Helen herself is the prize of victory as well as the Queen of Beauty. Attended by her maidens, she goes down to the place where the aged Priam, like the kings of the Old Testa ment history, "sits in the gate" surrounded by the elders of his city. It is the "Scæan," or "left-hand " gate, which opens towards the camp of the enemy, and commands a view of their lines. We have had no word as yet of the marvellous beauty of Helen. There is no attempt to describe it throughout the whole of the poem. But here, in a few masterly touches, introduced in the simplest and most natural manner, Homer does more than describe it, when he tells us its effects. The old men break off their talk as the beautiful stranger draws near. They had seen her often enough before; the fatal face and form must have been well known in the streets and palaces of Troy, however retired a life Helen might well have thought it becoming in her unhappy position to lead. But the fair vision comes upon their eyes with a new and everincreasing enchantment. They say each to the other as they look upon her, "It is no blame to Greeks or Trojans to fight for such a woman-she is worth all the ten years of war; still, let her embark and go home, lest we and our children suffer more for her." Even the earliest critics, when the finer shades of criticism were little understood, were forcibly struck with the art of the poet in selecting his witnesses for the defence. The Roman Quintilian had said nearly all that modern taste has since confirmed. He bids the reader mark who gives this testimony to Helen's charms. Not the infatuated Paris, who has set his own honour and his country's welfare at nought for the sake of an unlawful passion; not some young Trojan, who might naturally be ready to vow the world well lost" for such a woman; nor yet any of the vulgar crowd, easily impressed, and always extravagant in its praise or blame; but these 66 grave and reverend seniors, men of cold passions and calm judgment, fathers whose sons were fighting and falling for this woman's sake, and even Priam himself, whose very crown and kingdom she had brought in deadly peril. He receives her, as she draws near, with gentle courtesy. Plainly, in his estimation, her unhappy position does not involve necessarily shame or disgrace. This opens one of the difficult questions of the moral doctrine of the Iliad, which can only be understood by bearing in mind the supernatural machinery of the poem. To the modern reader, the character of Helen, and the light in which she is regarded alike by Greeks and Trojans, present an anomaly in morals which is highly unsatisfactory. It is not as if Homer, like the worst writers of the Italian school, set marriage vows at nought, and made a jest of unchastity. Far otherwise; the heathen bard on such points took an infinitely higher tone than many so-called Christian poets. The difficulty lies in the fact that throughout the poem, while the crime is reprobated, the criminal meets with forbearance, and even sympathy. Our first natural impulse with regard to Helen is to look upon her much in the light in which she herself, in one of her bitter confessions, says she is looked upon by the mass of the Trojans : Throughout wide Troy I see no friendly eye, 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. 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 divinethat 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 |