There was no historian to record the event. But it lived on, in memory and in legend; and as the people became more settled, wandering bards made songs about it. The rich Mycenæn Age flourished and died; and the Homeric civilization took its place. Probably it was then that the floating fragments of the Tale of Troy first were woven together, providing material for the Homeric epics that we know as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Probably they were not written down at first. They were composed, and recited, in separate parts, in the halls of the great lords, who loved to look back on this glorious event of their national life, and to hear the names of their remote and half-mythical ancestors brought into the story. Thus Homer, no matter who he or his school may have been, comes to represent a high stage of civilization. His poems have a lofty tone, a chivalrous spirit, a sweet cleanliness of thought and of word, which do not belong to a primitive, uncivilized people. They do not, as a fact, belong naturally to the early period of which he sings. In the time of that grim struggle before the dawn of history, there must have been much that was ugly, dark and barbarous. This is proved to us by the survival of some of the older legends upon which Homer worked. They tell of unnatural crime and of deeds of horror such as he never mentions; and they give us, too, a very different interpretation of the story of Helen. Homer puts aside all these vestiges of a primitive past. He is composing lays for a people who have a keen sense of honour, a supreme ideal of beauty and a love of home; who have a religious feeling strong enough to reverence the gods, despite their many hieratic quarrels, and who hold womanhood in high esteem. So when we come to him to hear about Helen, we find a very sweet and gracious figure, quite unlike the Helen of the later poets. With them she was degraded from her rank of demi-god. She was regarded as a real figure, brought down to the level of ordinary existence, and judged by the common standard. The romantic charm of the Homeric conception faded; and her name had for centuries an evil sound. It has passed through many vicissitudes since. In late Greek literature, one or two poets tried to return to the reverent attitude of Homer: but in the Middle Ages she became again a byword and a reproach. At the Renaissance, something of her early worship as an ideal of beauty was revived, and our own Marlowe has passionately expressed the thought of that age about her: _Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.... Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars._