"Once a lover, always a lover." And so it turns out; for, at the opening of the _Orestes_, Helen arrives in comfort at the side of Menelaus. He now is afraid lest she should be seized and stoned by the Argives, whose children had been slain for her sake in Troy. Nor is the fear vain. Orestes and Pylades lay hold of her, and already the knife is at her throat, when Phoebus descends and declares that Helen has been caught up to heaven to reign with her brothers Castor and Polydeukes. A more unethical termination to her adventures can hardly be imagined; for Euripides, following hitherto upon the lines of the Homeric story, has been at great pains to analyze her legend into a common tale of adultery and female fascination. He now suddenly shifts his ground and deifies the woman he had sedulously vilified before. His true feeling about Helen is expressed in the lines spoken by Electra to Clytemnestra (_Electra_, 1062): #to men gar eidos ainon axion pherei Helenês te kai sou, dyo d' ephyte syngonô, amphô mataiô Kastoros t' ouk axiô. hê men gar harpastheis' hekous' apôleto, sy d' andr' ariston Hellados diôlesas.# "You and your sister are a proper pair, and your beauty has brought you the credit you deserve: both are light women and unworthy of Castor; for Helen allowed herself to be ravished and undone, while you killed the best man in Greece." Further illustrations of the Euripidean conception of Helen as a worthless woman, who had the art to reconquer a weak husband's affection, might be drawn from the tirade of Peleus against Menelaus in the _Andromache_ (590, etc.).[22]