r feet. She
stooped to pick it up, and Hippomenes regained the lead. Again she
passed him, and again a golden apple caused her to pause, and Hippomenes
shot ahead. Finally, just as she was about to reach the goal, the third
golden apple tempted her to stop once more, and Hippomenes won the race
and a peerless bride.

III

WOMEN OF THE ILIAD

The reader of the Iliad and the Odyssey finds himself in an atmosphere
altogether human. As he peruses these pages, so rich in pictures of the
life and manners of heroic times, it matters little to him whether the
men and women of epic song had merely a mythical existence, or were, in
fact, historical figures. The contemporaries of Homer and later Greeks
had an unshaken belief in the reality of those men and women; and the
poet has breathed into them the breath of genius, which gives life and
immortality.

We have in these poems the most ancient expression of the national
sentiment of the Greeks, and from them we can form a correct idea of the
relations of men and women in prehistoric times, and of the character
and status of woman in the childhood of the Greek world.

It is a noteworthy fact that the plots of both the Iliad and the
Odyssey--as well as the most interesting episodes they contain--turn
upon love for women; and a clear idea of the importance of woman in the
Heroic Age could not be given better than by briefly reviewing the
brilliant panorama of warlike and domestic scenes in which woman
figures.

We are first introduced to a Greek camp in Troy land. During ten long
years the hosts of the Achaeans have been gathered before the walls of
Ilium. What is the cause of this long struggle? A woman! Paris, son of
King Priam, had carried off to his native city Queen Helen, wife of
Menelaus, King of Sparta. Aided by the wiles of Aphrodite, to whom he
had awarded the golden apple as the fairest in the contest of the three
goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, Paris succeeded in winning the
heart of this fairest of Greek women and in persuading her to desert
husband and daughter to follow the fortunes of a handsome stranger. On
the isle of Cranae their nuptial rites were celebrated, and after much
voyaging they reached their new home in Troy, where King Priam,
fascinated with the beauty and grace of this new daughter, in spite of
his dread of the consequences, graciously received the errant pair. The
Greek chieftains bound themselves by an inviolable oath to assis