when I followed thy son, and left my bridal bower and my kin, and my
daughter dear, and the maidens of like age with me." Agamemnon she
calls, "the husband's brother of me shameless; alas, that such an one
should be." She names many of the warriors, but misses her brothers
Castor and Polydeuces, "own brothers of mine, one mother bare us.
Either they followed not from pleasant Lacedaemon, or hither they
followed in swift ships, but now they have no heart to go down into
the battle for dread of the shame and many reproaches that are mine."

"So spake she, but already the life-giving earth did cover them,
there in Lacedaemon, in their own dear country."

Menelaus and Paris fought out their duel, the Trojan was discomfited,
but was rescued from death and carried to Helen's bower by Aphrodite.
Then the Goddess came in disguise to seek Helen on the wall, and
force her back into the arms of her defeated lover. Helen turned on
the Goddess with an abruptness and a force of sarcasm and invective
which seem quite foreign to her gentle nature. "Wilt thou take me
further yet to some city of Phrygia or pleasant Maeonia, if there any
man is dear to thee . . . 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. She
then expresses her penitence to Hector, "would that the fury of the
wind had borne me afar to the mountains, or the wave of the roaring