Helenus

“ HELENUS, in Greek legend, son of Priam and Hecuba, and twin-brother of Cassandra. He is said to have been originally called Scamandrius, and to have received the name of Helenus from a Thracian soothsayer who instructed him in the prophetic art. In the Iliad he is described as the prince of augurs and a brave warrior ”

“ Whilst the Specials, no more than a fine black Tom I keep to serenade Mary from The tiles, where he lounges every night, Knew nor cared what they did, and were perfectly right.
But the fact was thus: one Helenus, A man much faster than any of us, More fast than a gent at the top of a “bus,” More fast than the coming of “Per col. sus.” Which Shakespeare says comes galloping, (I take his word for anything) This Helenus had a cure of souls— He had cured the souls of several Greeks, Achilles sole or heel,—the rolls Of fame (not French) say Paris:—speaks Anatomist Quain thereof. ”

“ Helenus, besides being a king and the son of a king, was a famous soothsayer, so AEneas begged him to exercise his powers of prophecy on behalf of himself and his people. Helenus readily complied with the request. After offering the usual sacrifices to the gods, he told the Trojan chief that he had yet a long voyage to make before reaching his destination, that the place in which he should found his new kingdom was on the banks of a river, and that he would know it by finding there a white sow, with a litter of thirty young ones. ”

“ His cousin, Helenus, who had also been driven away from Troy, was ruling there, and he had built a new city for himself and his comrades.
"Helenus was a prophet, as it seemed, and he told Æneas that after he reached Italy he would find an old white sow with thirty little [49] pigs around her. He must build a city for himself wherever he should find her.
"Æneas had many other adventures after leaving Helenus. Among other things, he met a horrible giant who had lost the sight of his one eye, but was still terrible. ”

“ Hastily Æneas leaves this place with an earnest prayer that this dire threat may be averted. Past green Zacynthos, Dulichium, and craggy Neritos they go, past Ithaca, cursing it for crafty Ulysses' sake, and reach the rocky shores of Actium; then on past the Phæacian land to Buthrotum in Epirus, on the western shore of Greece. He is astounded and delighted to find that the strange fortunes of war have set Helenus, son of Priam, here as king, with Andromache, wife of the lamented Hector, as his queen. ”

“ Andromache and Helenus were both given to Neoptolemus, who, according to the Ilias Minor, carried away also Æneas as his captive.
Helen gladly resumed her union with Menelaus; she accompanied him back to Sparta, and lived with him there many years in comfort and dignity, passing afterward to a happy immortality in the Elysian fields. She was worshipped as a goddess, with her brothers, the Dioscuri, and her husband, having her temple, statue, and altar at Therapnæ and elsewhere. Various examples of her miraculous intervention were cited among the Greeks. ”

“ Here they landed and to their astonishment learned that certain Trojan exiles, who had been carried there as prisoners, had become rulers of the country. Andromache, the widow of Hector, had borne three sons to Neoptolemus in Epirus. But when he cast her off for Hermione, he left her to her fellow-captive, Helenus, Hector's brother. Now that Neoptolemus was dead she had become the wife of Helenus; and they ruled the realm. Helenus and Andromache treated the exiles with the utmost hospitality, and dismissed them loaded with gifts.
Fig. 182. Scylla
250. ”

“ HELEN, or Helena (Gr. Ἑλένη) ,in Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus by Leda (wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta) , sister of Castor, Pollux and Clytaemnestra, and wife of Menelaus. Other accounts make her the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis, or of Oceanus and Tethys. She was the most beautiful woman in Greece, and indirectly the cause of the Trojan war. When a child she was carried off from Sparta by Theseus to Attica, but was recovered and taken back by her brothers. When she grew up, the most famous of the princes of Greece sought her hand in marriage, and her father’s choice fell upon Menelaus. ”

“ Homeward sailed the Greeks, taking as royal captives poor Cassandra and Andromache and many another Trojan. And home at last went fair Helen, the cause of all this sorrow, eager to be forgiven by her husband, King Menelaus. For she had awakened from the enchantment of Venus, and even before the death of Paris she had secretly longed for her home and kindred. Home to Sparta she came with the king after a long and stormy voyage, and there she lived and died the fairest of women. ”

“ This queen had been reared as the daughter of Tyndarus and Queen Leda, but some say that she was the child of an enchanted swan, and there was indeed a strange spell about her. All the greatest heroes of Greece had wooed her before she left her father's palace to be the wife of King Menelaus; and Tyndarus, fearing for her peace, had bound her many suitors by an oath. According to this pledge, they were to respect her choice, and to go to the aid of her husband if ever she should be stolen away from him. For in all Greece there was nothing so beautiful as the beauty of Helen. ”

“ For in all Greece there was nothing so beautiful as the beauty of Helen. She was the fairest woman in the world.
Now thus did Venus fulfill her promise and the shepherd win his reward with dishonor. Paris dwelt at the court of Menelaus for a long time, treated with a royal courtesy which he ill repaid. For at length, while the king was absent on a journey to Crete, his guest won the heart of Fair Helen, and persuaded her to forsake her husband and sail away to Troy, or Ilium. ”

“ And the women! white-armed Briseïs, motherly Hecuba, Andromache and gentle Cressida, Chryseïs, grave Cassandra, Penelope, Polyxena, Iphigenia, the lithe, dark-eyed beauty of Myrine the Amazon, and the golden radiance of Helen, her face like noon sunlight—Helen of Sparta, for whose sake the Greeks are forever named Hellenes, at whose shrine all men worship, and shall worship so long as beauty endures—these came into the high-roofed hall ”

“ Now the most beautiful girl in the world was named Helen, and she was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. But in spite of that fact Venus told Paris to go to Sparta in Greece, where he would find Helen, and then run away with her. So Paris went to Sparta to visit King Menelaus and was royally entertained by him. And then Paris, although he had been treated so kindly and been trusted, one night stole Helen away and carried her off across the sea to Troy. Though this was in the Iron Age, it was the way a Cave Man of the Stone Age might have acted. ”

“ While reading the Helena we feel ourselves under the cloudless Grecian sky; we breathe the Grecian air with Helen herself.
The scene is laid before the palace of Menelaus at Sparta. Helen, accompanied by a band of captive Trojan maidens, has been disembarked at the mouth of the river Eurotas by Menelaus, on his return from Troy, and has been sent forward to Sparta to make preparation for the arrival of her husband and his warriors. ”

“ According to one, after the death of Menelaus, she was driven into exile by Nicostratus and Megapenthes, and retired to Rhodes, where the queen of that island, Polyxo, whose husband Tlepolemus had been killed in the Trojan war, caused her to be seized while bathing, tied to a tree, and strangled. The Rhodians commemorated the murder by a temple raised to Helena Dendritis, or Helen tied to a tree. The Spartans honored her as a goddess, and built a temple to her at Therapne, which had the power of conferring beauty upon all ugly women who entered it. ”

“ The message of Iris renews in Helen’s heart “a sweet desire for her lord and her own city, and them that begat her;” so, draped in silvery white, Helen goes with her three maidens to the walls. There, above the gate, like some king in the Old Testament, Paris sits among his counsellors, and they are all amazed at Helen’s beauty; “no marvel is it that Trojans and Achaeans suffer long and weary toils for such a woman, so wondrous like to the immortal goddesses.” Then Priam, assuring Helen that he holds her blameless, bids her name to him her kinsfolk and the other Achaean warriors. ”

“ Venus spake, and Helen, daughter of great Zeus, trembled and obeyed, wrapping her beautiful garments about her; and the goddess led her to the fragrant chamber in the palace, and set her on a chair before the goodly Paris.
But Helen looked askance at her lord, and chode him with bitter words. “Would that thou hadst never come back from the fight, but hadst perished by the arm of the warrior who was once my husband! Thou didst boast thyself to be a better man than Menelaus! Go then, and challenge him again, to meet thee face to face once more!” ”

“ Corrupt and fierce through Sparta's line.
Bred through me—bred through delicate hands
And wandering eyes and wanton lips,
Sighing after strange flesh as sighed these lips,
Straying after new sin as strayed these hands.
Mother of Helen! She whose breasts
To new desires unshaped the world;
Above Troy's summit towered these breasts,
Helen who wantoned with the world!
Helen is dead (she had love enough
To laugh at doom and mock at shrine)
And Clytemnestra, quiet enough
To-night beneath Apollo's shrine.
And I am left, the source, the spring
Of all their madness. ”

“ Thus did it come to pass that she made her home in Troy, and Priam, the king, became an accomplice in her sin; for the gods had so made her that the hearts of men were as wax between the fingers of Helen of Sparta.
In time came Menelaus, and stood in the halls of Priam, and demanded back his wife. And they offered him a ransom—gold and precious stones—but he flung it back in their faces.
"Think you that gold can pay for a living soul?" he cried. "Only a life can pay for a life, and many a life shall you pay for the sake of Helen. ”

“ The first decade begins with the carrying off from the court of Menelaus, king of Sparta, of his wife Helen, by a young Asiatic prince whom he has entertained in his travels. Helen is the reputed daughter of Jupiter by Leda, and upon her Venus has bestowed the fatal endowment of matchless and irresistible beauty. The young prince whom she unhappily captivates is Paris or Alexander, son of Priam, king of Troy. ”

“ The flame from many a fallen subject town
Flare on the starry verges of the sky,
And still from rich Maeonia came the cry
Of cities sack’d where’er Achilles led.
Yet none the more men deem’d the end was nigh
While knightly Hector fought unvanquished.
IV.
But ever as each dawn bore grief afar,
And further back, wax’d Paris glad and gay,
And on the fringes of the cloud of war
His arrows, like the lightning, still would play;
Yet fled he Menelaus on a day,
And there had died, but Aphrodite’s power
Him in a golden cloud did safe convey
Within the walls of Helen’s fragrant bower. ”

“ There is nothing more for you to desire. How, indeed, can care come in through these golden doors, and sit upon your brow, and weigh you down with heaviness?"
"I will tell you," answered the king, "for I know that I can trust your good judgment. Here in my palace are all the noblest princes of Hellas suing for the hand of Helen, whom the gods have cursed with more than mortal beauty. Each has offered me a price, and each expects to win her. I dare not withhold her long; for then all will become angered, and my kingdom as well as my daughter will be the prey of him who is the strongest. ”

“ And for a phantom the Greeks strove with the Trojans on the windy plains of Ilium. For a phantom's sake brave Hector died, and the leonine swiftness of Achilles was tamed, and Zeus bewailed Sarpedon, and Priam's towers were levelled with the ground. Helen, meanwhile—the beautiful, the inviolable—sat all day long among the palm-groves, twining lotus-flowers for her hair, and learning how to weave rare Eastern patterns in the loom. This legend hides a delicate satire upon human strife. For what do men disquiet themselves in warfare to the death, and tossing on sea-waves? ”

“ But he was writing seriously and aiming at beauty, not at satire. All legend said that Helen was made a goddess; and Euripides was always curiously haunted by the thought of Helen and by the mysterious and deadly power of mere superlative beauty. As Apollo had said to Menelaus (1638) :
Thy bride shall be another: none may know Her. For the Gods, to work much death and woe, Devised this loveliness all dreams above, That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin. ”

“ Sometimes Fair Helen came to look across the plain to the fellow-countrymen whom she had forsaken; and although she was the cause of all this war, the Trojans half forgave her when she passed by, because her beauty was like a spell, and warmed hard hearts as the sunshine mellows apples. So for nine years the Greeks plundered the neighboring towns, but the city Troy stood fast, and the Grecian ships waited with folded wings. ”

“ Nay, go thyself and sit down by Paris, and forswear the paths of the Gods, but ever lament for him and cherish him, till he make thee his wife, yea, or perchance his slave, but to him will I never go.” But this anger of Helen is soon overcome by fear, when the Goddess, in turn, waxes wrathful, and Helen is literally driven by threats—“for the daughter of Zeus was afraid,”—into the arms of Paris. Yet even so she taunts her lover with his cowardice, a cowardice which she never really condones. In the sixth book of the Iliad she has been urging him to return to the war. ”