heroes like Charles, so rhetorical, republican, and sophistical
Greece put its quibbles into the lips of Agamemnon and Helen, and
slandered the stainless and fearless Patroclus and Achilles.

The Helen of Euripides, in the "Troades," is a pettifogging sophist,
who pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the
"Helena," again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and
adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She
remained in Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow,
formed by the Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of
Euripides, a satirical drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak
of Helen in a strain of coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of
Isocrates on Helen may be regarded as a kind of answer to the attacks
of several speakers in the works of the tragedians. Isocrates
defends Helen simply on the plea of her beauty: "To Heracles Zeus
gave strength, to Helen beauty, which naturally rules over even
strength itself." Beauty, he declares, the Gods themselves consider
the noblest thing in the world, as the Goddesses showed when they
contended for the prize of loveliness. And so marvellous, says
Isocrates, was the beauty of Helen, that for her glory Zeus did not
spare his beloved son, Sarpedon; and Thetis saw Achilles die, and the
Dawn bewailed her Memnon. "Beauty has raised more mortals to
immortality than all the other virtues together." And that Helen is
now a Goddess, Isocrates proves by the fact that the sacrifices
offered to her in Therapnae, are such as are given, not to heroes,
but to immortal Gods.

When Rome took up the legends of Greece, she did so in no chivalrous
spirit. Few poets are less chivalrous than Virgil; no hero has less
of chivalry than his pious and tearful Aeneas. In the second book of