The Delphian oracle bade him seek the Isle of Leuke in the Euxine
Sea, where Aias would appear to him, and heal him. When Leonymus
returned from Leuke he told how Achilles dwelt there with his ancient
comrades, and how he was now wedded to Helen of Troy. Yet the local
tradition of Lacedaemon showed the sepulchre of Helen in Therapnae.
According to a Rhodian legend (adopted by the author of the "Epic of
Hades"), Helen was banished from Sparta by the sons of Menelaus, came
wandering to Rhodes, and was there strangled by the servants of the
queen Polyxo, who thus avenged the death of her husband at Troy. It
is certain, as we learn both from Herodotus (vi. 61) and from
Isocrates, that Helen was worshipped in Therapnae. In the days of
Ariston the king, a deformed child was daily brought by her nurse to
the shrine of Helen. And it is said that, as the nurse was leaving
the shrine, a woman appeared unto her, and asked what she bore in her
arms, who said, "she bore a child." Then the woman said, "show it to
me," which the nurse refused, for the parents of the child had
forbidden that she should be seen of any. But the woman straitly
commanding that the child should be shown, and the other beholding
her eagerness, at length the nurse showed the child, and the woman
caressed its face and said, "she shall be the fairest woman in
Sparta." And from that day the fashion of its countenance was
changed, "and the child became the fairest of all the Spartan women."

It is a characteristic of Greek literature that, with the rise of
democracy, the old epic conception of the ancient heroes altered. We
can scarcely recognize the Odysseus of Homer in the Odysseus of
Sophocles. The kings are regarded by the tragedians with some of the
distrust and hatred which the unconstitutional tyrants of Athens had
aroused. Just as the later chansons de geste of France, the poems
written in an age of feudal opposition to central authority, degraded