sea--ere ever these ill deeds were done!" In this passage too, she
prophesies that her fortunes will be [Greek text] famous in the
songs, good or evil, of men unborn. In the last book of the Iliad we
meet Helen once more, as she laments over the dead body of Hector.
"'Never, in all the twenty years since I came hither, have I heard
from thee one taunt or one evil word: nay, but if any other rebuked
me in the halls, any one of my husband's brothers, or of their
sisters, or their wives, or the mother of my husband (but the king
was ever gentle to me as a father), then wouldst thou restrain them
with thy loving kindness and thy gentle speech.' So spake she;
weeping."

In the Odyssey, Helen is once more in Lacedaemon, the honoured but
still penitent wife of Menelaus. How they became reconciled (an
extremely difficult point in the story), there is nothing in Homer to
tell us.

Sir John Lubbock has conjectured that in the morals of the heroic age
Helen was not really regarded as guilty. She was lawfully married,
by "capture," to Paris. Unfortunately for this theory there is
abundant proof that, in the heroic age, wives were nominally BOUGHT
for so many cattle, or given as a reward for great services. There
is no sign of marriage by capture, and, again, marriage by capture is
a savage institution which applies to unmarried women, not to women
already wedded, as Helen was to Menelaus. Perhaps the oldest
evidence we have for opinion about the later relations of Helen and
Menelaus, is derived from Pausanias's (174. AD.) description of the
Chest of Cypselus. This ancient coffer, a work of the seventh
century, B.C, was still preserved at Olympia, in the time of
Pausanias. On one of the bands of cedar or of ivory, was represented