Theseus was afterwards released from imprisonment by the assistance of Hercules, and returned home; but the Athenians had become so offended with his conduct, and were so angry at his having exposed them to ill treatment from the Lacedæmonians by his wicked attempt upon Helen, that they refused to receive him again as their sovereign. He therefore withdrew into exile, and soon after died in the island of Scyros. The Athenian people, however, never forgot the benefits he had in his wiser days conferred upon the state; and many centuries after his death, his bones, or some which were supposed to be his, were conveyed to Athens with great pomp, and a splendid temple was erected above them to his memory. The Lacedæmonian princess who was stolen away by Theseus afterwards became the occasion of a celebrated war. The fame of her great beauty having spread far and wide, many of the princes of Greece asked her from her father Tyndarus in marriage; but he, being fearful of incurring the enmity of the rejected suitors, declined showing a preference for any of them. Assembling them all, he bound them by an oath to acquiesce in the selection which Helen herself should make, and to protect her against any attempts which might afterwards be made to carry her off from the husband of her choice. Helen gave the preference to Menelaus, a grandson of Pelops, and this successful suitor, on the death of Tyndarus, was raised to the Spartan throne. * * * * * At this period, in the north-western part of Asia Minor, on the shores of the Hellespont and the Ægean Seas, there existed a kingdom, the capital of which was a large and well-fortified city named Troy, or Ilium. Priam the king of Troy, had a son whose name was Paris; and this young chief, in the course of a visit to Greece, resided for a time in Sparta at the court of Menelaus, who gave the Asiatic stranger a very friendly reception. Charmed with Helen’s beauty, Paris employed the opportunity afforded by a temporary absence of her husband to gain her affections, and persuade her to elope with him to Troy. It was not, according to the old poets, to his personal attractions, great as they were, that Paris owed his success on this occasion, but to the aid of the goddess of Love, whose favor he had won by assigning to her the palm of beauty, on an occasion when it was contested between her and two other female deities.