Even Homer, as Plato hints, knew not that blindness had fallen on him for like reason. To assail Helen with reproach was not less dangerous than to touch the Ark of the Covenant, for with the Greeks beauty was a holy thing. How perfectly beautiful she was we know from the legend of the cups modelled upon her breasts suspended in the shrine of Aphrodite. When Troy was taken, and the hungry soldiers of Odysseus roamed through the burning palaces of Priam and his sons, their swords fell beneath the vision of her loveliness. She had wrought all the ruin, yet Menelaus could not touch her, when she sailed forth, swan-like, fluttering white raiment, with the imperturbable sweet smile of a goddess on her lips. It remained for a Roman poet to describe her vile and shrinking: Illa sibi infestos eversa ob Pergama Teucros, Et poenas Danaûm et deserti conjugis iras Permetuens, Troiæ et patriæ communis Erinnys, Abdiderat sese atque aris invisa sedebat.[19] The morality of these lines belongs to a later age of reflection upon Greek romance. In Homer there are no such epigrams. Between the Helen of the _Iliad_, reverenced by the elders in the Scæan gate, and the Helen of the _Odyssey_, queen-like among her Spartan maidens, there has passed no agony of fear. The shame which she has truly felt has been tempered to a silent sorrow, and she has poured her grief forth beside Andromache over the corpse of Hector. If we would fain see the ideal beauty of the early Greek imagination in a form of flesh-and-blood reality, we must follow Helen through the Homeric poems. She first appears when Iris summons her to watch the duel of Paris and Menelaus. Husband and lover are to fight beneath the walls of Troy. She, meanwhile, is weaving a purple peplus with the deeds of war done and the woes endured for her sake far and wide: She in a moment round her shoulders flings Robe of white lawn, and from the threshold springs, Yearning and pale, with many a tender tear. Also two women in her train she brings, The large-eyed Clymené and Æthra fair, And at the western gates right speedily they were.[20] English eyes know well how Helen looked as she left her chamber and hastened to the gate; for has not Leighton painted her with just so much of far-off sorrow in her gaze as may become a daughter of the gods? In the gate sat Priam and his elders, and as they looked at Helen no angry curses rose to their lips, but reverential admiration filled them, together with an awful sense of the dread fate attending her: These, seeing Helen at the tower arrive, One to another wingèd words addressed: "Well may the Trojans and Achæans strive, And a long time bear sorrow and unrest, For such a woman, in her cause and quest, Who like immortal goddesses in face Appeareth; yet 'twere even thus far best In ships to send her back to her own place, Lest a long curse she leave to us and all our race."