there is always an ethereal element, hard to define,
but recognizable. She causes ruin and destruction, she is roundly abused
and reproached, yet she herself does not deal in invective and is proof
against all physical ill, being finally deified as the daughter of Zeus,
while suffering is invariably the fate of those who abuse and censure
her. And, like Stesichorus, Euripides in his old age makes a
recantation. In the _Helen_, he follows the Stesichorean version, and
dramatizes the legend that, after she was promised to Paris by
Aphrodite, Hera in revenge fashioned like to Queen Helen a breathing
phantom out of cloud land wrought for Priam's princely son; while Hermes
caught her away and transferred her to the halls of Proteus, King of
Egypt, to keep her pure for Menelaus. Thus it was for a phantom Helen
that Greek and Trojan fought at Troy; while the real Helen passed her
days amid the palm gardens of Egypt, eagerly awaiting the return of
Menelaus, and bewailing her ill name, though she was clean of sin. After
the war, she is happily reunited with her lord.

It is hard, however, to besmirch a conception of ideal beauty, and later
writers, casting aside the imputations of the dramatists, returned to
the Homeric type. The Greek rhetoricians found in Helen a fruitful
subject for panegyric, and made her synonymous with the Greek ideal of
beauty and feminine perfection. Isocrates praises her as the incarnation
of ideal loveliness and grace; beauty is all powerful, he says, and the
Helen legend shows how beauty is the most desirable of all human gifts.
Theocritus, in his exquisite _Epithalamium_, pays an unalloyed tribute
to her beauty and goodness. She is "peerless among all Achaean women that
walk the earth;--rose-red Helen, the glory of Lacedaemon;--no one is so
gifted as she in goodly handiwork;--yea, and of a truth, none other
smites the lyre, hymning Artemis and broad-breasted Athena, with such
skill as Helen, within whose eyes dwell all the Loves."

Quintus Smyrnaeus, of the fourth century of our era, who wrote a
_Post-Homerica_, emphasizes the demonic influence that controlled the
fate of Helen, and lays her frailty to the charge of Aphrodite. He gives
a beautiful picture of the queen as she is being led to the ships of the
Achaeans: "Now, Helen lamented not, but shame dwelt in her dark eyes and
reddened her lovely cheeks ... while round her the people marvelled as
they beheld the flawless grace and winsome beauty of