ory we have adopted, but
many other legends were known in Greece. Pausanias tells us that, in a
battle between the Crotoniats and the Locrians, one Leonymus charged the
empty space in the Locrian line, which was entrusted to the care of the
ghost of Aias. Leonymus was wounded by the invisible spear of the hero,
and could not be healed of the hurt. The Delphian oracle bade him seek
the Isle of Leuke in the Euxine Sea, where Aias would appear to him, and
heal him. When Leonymus returned from Leuke he told how Achilles dwelt
there with his ancient comrades, and how he was now wedded to Helen of
Troy. Yet the local tradition of Lacedaemon showed the sepulchre of
Helen in Therapnae. According to a Rhodian legend (adopted by the author
of the "Epic of Hades"), Helen was banished from Sparta by the sons of
Menelaus, came wandering to Rhodes, and was there strangled by the
servants of the queen Polyxo, who thus avenged the death of her husband
at Troy. It is certain, as we learn both from Herodotus (vi. 61) and
from Isocrates, that Helen was worshipped in Therapnae. In the days of
Ariston the king, a deformed child was daily brought by her nurse to the
shrine of Helen. And it is said that, as the nurse was leaving the
shrine, a woman appeared unto her, and asked what she bore in her arms,
who said, "she bore a child." Then the woman said, "show it to me,"
which the nurse refused, for the parents of the child had forbidden that
she should be seen of any. But the woman straitly commanding that the
child should be shown, and the other beholding her eagerness, at length
the nurse showed the child, and the woman caressed its face and said,
"she shall be the fairest woman in Sparta." And from that day the
fashion of its countenance was changed, "and the child became the fairest
of all the Spartan women."

It is a characteristic of Greek literature that, with the rise of
democracy, the old epic conception of the ancient heroes altered. We can
scarcely recognize the Odysseus of Homer in the Odysseus of Sophocles.
The kings are regarded by the tragedians with some of the distrust and
hatred which the unconstitutional tyrants of Athens had aroused. Just as
the later _chansons de geste_ of France, the poems written in an age of
feudal opposition to central authority, degraded heroes like Charles, so
rhetorical, republican, and sophistical Greece put its quibbles into the
lips of Agamemnon and Helen, and slandered the stainles