Helen, the wife of Menelaus, whose beauty was acclaimed as divine, accordingly was abducted by Paris. Menelaus and his brother, both powerful kings in Greece, collected an army with the aid of several other Greek princes and set sail at once for Troy, which they besieged in vain for nine years and finally captured by the stratagem of the Trojan horse. This was a huge wooden figure of a horse, in which certain of the Greek leaders lay hid while the rest sailed away, apparently giving up the siege and leaving the horse as an offering to the gods. The Trojans, rejoicing, dragged the monster within their walls, broken down to admit it, and at nightfall the concealed Greeks came out and opened the gates to the rest of their army, which had landed again under cover of darkness. Helen's life was spared, as she seems to have been regarded as a being of another world, guiltless of wrong intent, driven by fate into these misfortunes. The tragedies that befell upon the return of Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus form the subject of the great dramas of Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. The "Iliad" narrates events in the course of the siege, in which Achilles is the Greek hero, angered by Agamemnon and refusing to lead the troops to battle, until roused by the death of his friend Patroclus he rushes to the fray and slays Hector, the Trojan prince and leader, with whose funeral rites the poem closes. The fall of Troy is not treated by Homer; in fact it did not receive the consideration due its dramatic possibilities until a thousand years later, when Vergil, the Roman poet, described it in his "Æneid." This may be explained by the fact that the Greeks desired to hear the tale of their heroism and their leader's triumph rather than the sorrows of the enemy, while the Roman emperor Augustus, at whose request Vergil composed the "Æneid," wished to glorify Rome by tracing her origin back to the son of the Trojan prince, Æneas, who fled to Italy after Troy's downfall. The "Odyssey" recounts the wanderings of the Greek prince, Odysseus, detained by various casualties on his way home round the south of Greece to Ithaca, his island home in the Adriatic, and also deals with his vengeance on the suitors whom he found endeavoring to win the hand of his faithful wife Penelope. The "Iliad," as a piece of literature, seems to belong to a somewhat earlier day than the "Odyssey." The latter is more unified in construction, and shows greater knowledge of travel and a higher religious and social standard. The selections of the former are from the two great metrical translations of Pope and of Chapman. Pope's work (1715) is in the full flower of the Age of Classicism, and is thoroughly characteristic of that period. Chapman's (1611), less polished, belongs to the late Renaissance, whose rugged, adventurous spirit was far nearer that of the Homeric age and is preferred by many on this account.