Helen of Troy--Her Eternal Youth.--Variety of Legends connected with her.--Stesichorus.--Helen in the _Iliad_.--Helen in the _Odyssey_.--The Treatment of Helen by Æschylus.--Euripidean Handling of her Romance.--Helen in Greek Art.--Quintus Smyrnæus.--Apollonius of Tyana and the Ghost of Achilles.--Helen in the Faust Legend.--Marlowe and Goethe.--Penelope--Her Home-love.--Calypso and the Isle Ogygia.--Circe.--The Homeric and the Modern Circe.--Nausicaa--Her Perfect Girlishness.--Briseis and Andromache.--The Sense of Proportion and of Relative Distance in Homer's Pictures.--Andromache and Astyanax.--The Cult of Heroes and Heroines in Greece.--Artistic Presentation of Homeric Persons.--Philostratus. For first of all the spherèd signs whereby Love severs light from darkness, and most high In the white front of January there glows The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose. Prelude to _Tristram and Iseult_, lines 91-94. Helen of Troy is one of those ideal creatures of the fancy over which time, space, and circumstance, and moral probability exert no sway. It would be impossible to conceive of her except as inviolably beautiful and young, in spite of all her wanderings and all she suffered at the hands of Aphrodite and of men. She moves through Greek heroic legend as the desired of all men and the possessed of many. Theseus bore her away while yet a girl from Sparta. Her brethren, Castor and Polydeukes, recovered her from Athens by force, and gave to her Æthra, the mother of Theseus, for bondwoman. Then all the youths of Hellas wooed her in the young world's prime. She was at last assigned in wedlock to Menelaus, by whom she conceived her only earthly child, Hermione. Paris, by aid of Aphrodite, won her love and fled with her to Egypt and to Troy. In Troy she abode more than twenty years, and was the mate of Deiphobus after the death of Paris. When the strife raised for her sake was ended, Menelaus restored her with honor to his home in Lacedæmon. There she received Telemachus and saw her daughter mated to Neoptolemus. But even after death she rested not from the service of love. The great Achilles, who in life had loved her by hearsay, but had never seen her, clasped her among the shades upon the island Leuké, and begat Euphorion. Through all these adventures Helen maintains an ideal freshness, a mysterious virginity of soul. She is not touched by the passion she inspires, or by the wreck of empires ruined in her cause. Fate deflours her not, nor do years impair the magic of her charm. Like beauty, she belongs alike to all and none. She is not judged as wives or mothers are, though she is both; to her belong soul-wounding blossoms of inexorable love, as well as pain-healing poppy-heads of oblivion; all eyes are blinded by the adorable, incomparable grace which Aphrodite sheds around her form.[17]