eelings followed the
practice of the times, and that they composed themselves to bear without
reluctance whatever their destiny forced upon them. When Priam ventured
into the Grecian camp for Hector's body, and stood under the roof of
Achilles, he endured to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever
yet endured--to give his hand to his son's destroyer. Briseis, whose bed
was made desolate by the hand of the same Achilles, finds it her one
greatest consolation, that the conqueror stoops to choose her to share
his own. And when Hector in his last sad parting scene anticipates a
like fate for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony of
horror with which such a possible future would be regarded by a modern
husband; nor does Andromache, however bitterly she feels the danger,
protest, as a modern wife would do, that there was no fear for
her--that death by sorrow's hand, or by her own, would preserve her to
rejoin him.

Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, conclusively
fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years'
elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace,
entertaining her husband's guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not
afraid even in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past--in strong
terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing
prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this respect
the Homeric Greeks were better than their contemporaries in Palestine;
and on the whole there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity
when women held a higher place, or the relation between wife and husband
was of a more free and honourable kind.

For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the
theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there
is no doubt that Penelope is Homer's heroine in the Odyssey. One design,
at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of
the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted
on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the
trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter.
Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a
divine [Greek: aoidos], a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand
between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her
passion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty
weary yea