fficult lyric is: "This is not the first
time Troy has been taken. Long ago Heracles made war against the old
king Laomedon, because he had not given him the immortal steeds that he
promised. And Telamon joined him; Telamon who might have been happy in
his island of Salamis, among the bees and the pleasant waters, looking
over the strait to the olive-laden hills of Athens, the beloved City!
And they took ship and slew Laomedon. Yea, twice Zeus has destroyed
Ilion!

(Second part.) Is it all in vain that our Trojan princes have been loved
by the Gods? Ganymedes pours the nectar of Zeus in his banquets, his
face never troubled, though his motherland is burned with fire! And, to
say nothing of Zeus, how can the Goddess of Morning rise and shine upon
us uncaring? She loved Tithonus, son of Laomedon, and bore him up from
us in a chariot to be her husband in the skies. But all that once made
them love us is gone!"

[35] Pools of thy bathing.]--It is probable that Ganymedes was himself
originally a pool or a spring on Ida, now a pourer of nectar in heaven.

[36] Menelaus and Helen.]--The meeting of Menelaus and Helen after the
taking of Troy was naturally one of the great moments in the heroic
legend. The versions, roughly speaking, divide themselves into two. In
one (_Little Iliad_, Ar. _Lysistr_. 155, Eur. _Andromache_ 628) Menelaus
is about to kill her, but as she bares her bosom to the sword, the sword
falls from his hand. In the other (Stesichorus, _Sack of Ilion_ (?))
Menelaus or some one else takes her to the ships to be stoned, and the
men cannot stone her. As Quintus of Smyrna says, "They looked on her as
they would on a God!"

Both versions have affected Euripides here. And his Helen has just the
magic of the Helen of legend. That touch of the supernatural which
belongs of right to the Child of Heaven--a mystery, a gentleness, a
strange absence of fear or wrath--is felt through all her words. One
forgets to think of her guilt or innocence; she is too wonderful a being
to judge, too precious to destroy. This supernatural element, being the
thing which, if true, separates Helen from other women, and in a way
redeems her, is for that reason exactly what Hecuba denies. The
controversy has a certain eternal quality about it: the hypothesis of
heavenly enchantment and the hypothesis of mere bad behaviour, neither
of them entirely convincing! But the very curses of those that hate her
make a kind of superhuman atmosphere