his former unworthy treatment, and only remembering with affection the walls which he had helped to build, is represented as taking part with the Trojans in the great struggle, in which the deities of Olympus are bitterly divided amongst themselves.
But Homer’s Tale of Troy says nothing of Laomedon and his broken faith. His poem is built upon a later legend. This legend embraces in the whole a period of thirty years, divided exactly, in a manner very convenient for both poet and reader, into complete decades; ten years of preparation for the siege, ten occupied in the siege itself (with which alone the Iliad has to do), and ten consumed in the weary wanderings and final return home of the surviving Greek heroes who had taken part in the expedition.
The first decade begins with the carrying off from the court of Menelaus, king of Sparta, of his wife Helen, by a young Asiatic prince whom he has entertained in his travels. Helen is the reputed daughter of Jupiter by Leda, and upon her Venus has bestowed the fatal endowment of matchless and irresistible beauty. The young prince whom she unhappily captivates is Paris or Alexander, son of Priam, king of Troy. Terrible oracles had accompanied the birth of him who was to prove the curse of his father’s people. His mother Hecuba dreamed that she gave birth to a flaming brand. The child when born was exposed on Mount Ida, so as to insure his death in infancy without incurring the guilt of blood. But, as in similar legends, the precaution did but help to fulfil the prophecy. In the solitudes of the mountain he grew up, a boy of wondrous beauty, the nursling and the favourite of Venus. There he was called upon to decide
