already (so the ancient legend said) rescued their beautiful sister in her girlhood from the hands of Theseus, who had been amongst the mighty hunters of the Calydonian boar, and had formed part of the adventurous crew of the Argo, had finished their mortal warfare years before in a raid in Messenia; but to reappear as demigods in Greek and Roman legend,—the spirit horsemen who rallied the Roman line in the great fight with the Latins at the Lake Regillus, the "shining stars" who lighted the sailors on the stormy Adriatic, and gave their names to the ship in which St Paul was cast away.
"Back comes the chief in triumph,
Who, in the hour of fight,
Hath seen the Great Twin Brethren
In harness on his right.
Safe comes the ship to harbour,
Through billows and through gales,
If once the Great Twin Brethren
Sit shining on the sails[1]
This picturesque dialogue between Priam and his fascinating guest is interrupted far too soon for the reader's complete enjoyment—somewhat too abruptly, indeed, for its perfection. One would like to have heard Helen's estimate of the other leaders of the Greeks; of Diomed, of the lesser Ajax, of Nestor, of Mnestheus the Athenian; and it is hardly possible not to fancy that the scene has been left by the poet incomplete, or that some portion has been lost past recovery. The tragedian Æschylus, who was full of the true Homeric spirit, carried out the idea to what seems its natural completion in a remarkable scene of 'The Seven Chiefs against Thebes,' to which we may
- ↑ Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.
