companied Paris to Troy.

AEschylus searches into the dire consequences of Helen's sin, and on her
shoulders lays all the sufferings of Agamemnon and his descendants.
"Rightly is she called Helen," says he; "a hell of ships, hell of men,
hell of cities." He regards her as the very incarnation of evil, the
curse of two great nations. Yet even stern AEschylus yields due reverence
to her all-conquering beauty:

"Ah! silent, see she stands;
Each glowing tint, each radiant grace,
That charm th' enraptur'd eye, we trace;
And still the blooming form commands,
Still honor'd, still ador'd,
Though careless of her former loves,
Far o'er the rolling sea the wanton roves."

He also represents her forsaken husband ever dreaming of her, enraptured
of her beauty:

"Oft as short slumbers close his eyes,
His sad soul sooth'd to rest,
The dream-created visions rise
With all her charms imprest:
But vain th' ideal scene that smiles
With rapt'rous love and warm delight;
Vain his fond hopes; his eager arms
The fleeting form beguiles,
On sleep's quick pinions passing light."

AEschylus is not the only one of the early dramatists to whom Helen
furnished a worthy theme; the titles of four lost plays show that
Sophocles wrote of the Argive queen. There is no means of knowing,
however, how this master dealt with the romance. Judging from his
treatment of the Antigone legend, it is probable that Sophocles treated
Helen as a woman of rare beauty and power, more sinned against than
sinning, and subjected her character to the most profound analysis.

While AEschylus deprived Helen of something of the delicacy and charm
with which Homer had invested her, Euripides, in a number of his plays,
goes even further, and brings her down to the level of common life. Upon
her beautiful head were heaped the reproaches of the unfortunate maidens
and matrons of Greece and Troy for the woes they had to suffer, and we
must not always take the sentiments of a Hecuba or a Clytemnestra as
expressing the poet's own convictions. In the _Daughters of Troy_, he
represents her in violent debate with her mother-in-law, Hecuba, before
Menelaus, leaving with the reader the impression that she is a guilty,
wilful woman of ignoble traits, and in other plays he lays on her the
load of guilt for all the dire consequences of her act; yet in his
treatment of Helen