Hector answered her with a gentle word, and went out, bearing on his shoulders the doom of Troy. In his chivalrous kindness to Helen, he is a worthy son of Priam; and when he was slain at last, fighting for his beloved city alone with the terrible Achilles, Helen joined her lament to those of his mother and his wife, in perhaps the most noble tribute to his memory: “Hector, of all my brethren of Troy, far dearest to my heart. Truly my lord is godlike Paris who brought me to Troy-land; would that I had died ere then. For this is now the twentieth year since I went thence and am gone from my own native land, but never yet heard I evil or despiteful word from thee; nay, if any other haply upbraided me in the palace halls, whether brother or sister of thine or brother’s fair-robed wife, or thy mother, then wouldst thou soothe such with words and refrain them, by the gentleness of thy spirit and by thy gentle words. Therefore bewail I thee with pain at heart, and my hapless self with thee, for no more is any left in wide Troy-land to be my friend and kind to me, but all men shudder at me.”[2] Almost with these words the poem closes, telling us nothing of the dreadful sack of Troy by the Achaians, after they had entered the city through the device of the wooden horse. Our last glimpse of Helen in the Iliad is as she wails her mournful threnos over the body of Hector. _And Helen’s sorrow brake into lament As bursts a lake the barriers of a hill, For lost, lost, lost was that one friend who still Stood by her with kind speech and gentle heart._[1] We hear no word of the Greek calamity in the fall of Achilles, or how Paris was slain by the arrow of the outcast Philoctetes, with perfect poetical justice. Nothing is told of the massacre of Priam and his sons; of the burning of the city; of the carrying off of its wealth and of its fair women when the Greeks, sated with revenge at last, set sail for Argos. And we hear no word of the most amazing fact of all—the reconciliation of Helen and Menelaus. We know from the _Odyssey_ that they were reconciled, but how, Homer does not say. Legend and song have been busy with the theme, however, and the most beautiful story has been woven by Andrew Lang into his _Helen of Troy_. There we see how Aphrodite in the midst of the slaughter and outrage, led Helen in safety to the ships, while Menelaus raged through the city seeking her, grimly determined to give her over to the vengeance of the army. _But Helen found he never where the flame Sprang to the roofs, and Helen ne’er he found Where flocked the wretched women in their shame The helpless altars of the gods around...._