When the poets began to analyze, the glamour of this witching goddess was lost, and she became a sinning, soul-destroying woman, a human Circe that lured men to ruin. But the Greeks did not like to see their idols slandered or broken, so in later times they gave her a shadowy existence on the banks of the Nile, where we catch a last glimpse of her, sitting unruffled among the palms, in all the splendor of her radiant beauty, twining wreaths of lotus-flowers for her golden hair, and learning rare secrets of Eastern looms, while men fought and died across the sea for a phantom. It is not upon these fanciful pictures, however, that we like to dwell. The Helen who lives and breathes for us is the Helen of Homer, fair and sweet, more sinned against than sinning, pitying the sorrows she cannot cure, but saved by her matchless charm from the chilling frost of mortal censure. These women of Homer were mostly wives and daughters of kings. Whether it was because he had been greeted with gentle words and caressing smiles by the fair patricians to whom he recited his verses that he painted them in such glowing colors, or because the women of the heroic age really had the unstudied grace and simple dignity that spring from conscious freedom, we cannot know. But it is certain that the measure of honor and liberty which they enjoyed was a privilege of caste rather than of sex, though it gave them a virile quality, and added a fresh luster of spontaneity to their domestic virtues. The lesser women had small consideration. We find the captives, even of royal descent, tossed about among their masters with no regard to their wishes, or rights--if they had any, which seems doubtful. The gentle Briseïs, a high priest’s daughter, and as potent a factor in the final disasters of the Greeks as the divine Helen herself, was the merest puppet in the hands of the so-called heroes who quarreled over her, and Chryseïs was only saved from the same fate by the kind interference of Apollo. The bitterest drop in the cup of Hector was the thought of his wife led away weeping by some “mail-clad Achaian,” with no one to hear her cries or save her from the hopeless fate of weaving and carrying water at the bidding of another. The women of the people fared little better, if as well. Ulysses had no hesitation in putting to death a dozen of his wife’s maids whose conduct did not please him, and he threatened his devoted nurse Euryclea with a like fate, if she revealed the secret of his identity, which she had been the first to divine. III It is difficult to comprehend the attitude of the dramatists of the golden age toward women. They have left many fine and powerful types; they have created heroines of singular moral grandeur and a superb quality of courage that led them to face death or the bitterest fate as serenely as if they were composing themselves to pleasant dreams; but there was no insult or injustice too great to be heaped upon their sex.