Presently, Paris and Menelaus are engaged in fight below the walls, with Helen looking on from above in fearful expectancy. It was an unequal fight. Aphrodite had joined the side of Paris; and when, despite her tricks, Menelaus was gaining on his opponent, the goddess enveloped Paris in a cloud and carried him off. In plain words, he ran away; and Helen, shamed and indignant, received a summons from Aphrodite to go to her cowardly lover. She turned in wrath upon the goddess: “Strange queen, why art thou desirous now to beguile me? Go and sit thou by his side, and depart from the way of the gods; neither let thy feet ever bear thee back to Olympus, but still be vexed for his sake and guard him till he make thee his wife or perchance his slave. But thither will I not go—that were a sinful thing—to array the bed of him; all the women of Troy will blame me hereafter; and I have griefs untold within my soul.”[2] Aphrodite triumphs, however, menacing Helen with terrible threats; and leads her back to the house of Paris. Meanwhile, the gods ‘on golden pavement round the board of Zeus’ had decreed that Troy should fall: Hera and Athena were to wreak their vengeance upon it, for the insult of Paris. The truce broken, the armies rushed into conflict again, and two of the gods who were warring for Troy, were driven back to Olympus. Then Hector came into the palace to rouse his brother, and found him sitting in Helen’s room, polishing his armour. To the scornful reproaches of Hector, Paris gave only puerile answers, and Helen turned from him to Hector in passionate scorn. “Dear brother mine, would that on the day that my mother bare me, a billow of the loud-sounding sea might have swept me away before all these things came to pass. Howbeit, seeing that the gods devised all these ills in this wise, would that then I had been mated with a better man, that felt dishonour and the multitude of men’s reproachings. But as for him, neither has he now sound heart, nor ever will have; therefore deem I moreover that he will reap the fruit.”[2]