‘O fair, O gracious maiden, the while we chant our lay, A wedded wife art thou. But we, at dawning of the day, Forth to the grassy mead will go, to our old racing place, And gather wreaths of odorous flowers, and think upon thy face, Again, again, Helen, on thee, as young lambs in the dew Think of the milk that fed them and run back to mother ewe. For thee the first of Maidens shall the lotus creeping low Be culled to hang in garlands where the shadowy plane doth grow; To thee where grows the shadowy plane the first oil shall be poured, Drop by drop from a silver cruse, to hold thy name adored: And letters on the bark be wrought, for him who goes to see, A message graven Dorian-wise: “Kneel; I am Helen’s tree.”’ [Illustration: FIG. 95.] Helen as local heroine had, it would seem, not only a sanctuary and a sacred tree but a very ancient image. The design in figs. 95 and 96 is from a lekythos[836] in the Louvre, of the kind usually known as ‘proto-Corinthian.’ Its style dates it as not later than the 7th century B.C., and it is our earliest extant monument of ‘the rape of Helen.’ The subject seems to have had a certain popularity in archaic art, as it occurred on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae[837]. In the centre of the design stands a woman-figure of more than natural size. Two men advance against her from the right; the foremost seizes her by the wrist. In his left hand he holds a sceptre. He is Theseus, and behind him comes Peirithoös, brandishing a great sword. To the left of Helen are her two brothers, the horsemen Kastor and Polydeukes. It is important to note that Helen is here more image than living woman. Dr Blinkenberg, who rightly interprets the scene as the rape of Helen, says ‘ses mains levées expriment la surprise et l’effroi,’ but since the discovery of the early image of the Mycenaean goddess with uplifted hands[838] it will at once be seen that the gesture is hieratic rather than human. This early 7th century document suggests that ‘the rape of Helen’ was originally perhaps the rape of a xoanon from a sanctuary, rather than of a wife from her husband. Be that as it may, the great dominant hieratic figure on the vase is more divine than human. [Illustration: FIG. 96.] For Homer, poet of the immigrant Achaeans, Helen of the old order of daughters of the land is a mortal heroine, beautiful and sinful, yet in a sense divine. To the modern poet she is altogether goddess, for she is Beauty herself: ‘O Light and Shadow of all things that be, O Beauty, wild with wreckage like the sea, Say, who shall win thee, thou without a name? O Helen, Helen, who shall die for thee?’