to whom the “Prize of Beauty”—the golden apple thrown by Discord into the feast of the Immortals, with that insidious legend inscribed on it—should be awarded. Three competing goddesses—Juno, Venus, and Minerva, who at least, as the goddess of wisdom, ought to have known better—appeared before the young shepherd in all the simplicity of immortal costume, in order that he might decide which of them was “the fairest.” Each tried to bribe him to adjudge the prize to herself. The Queen of Heaven offered him power in the future; Minerva, wisdom; Venus, the loveliest woman upon earth. Paris chose the last. It was Helen; for Venus took it very little into her account that she had a husband already. It involved also, according to the most picturesque of the legends, a somewhat similar breach of troth on Paris’s part. In the valleys of Ida he had already won the love of the nymph Œnone, but he deserts her without scruple under the new temptation.[1] He has learnt the secret of his royal birth, and is acknowledged by his father Priam. In spite of the warnings of his sister Cassandra, who has a gift of prophecy, and foresees evil from the expedition; in spite, too, of the forsaken Œnone’s wild denunciations, he fits out ships and sets sail for Greece. Admitted as a guest to the hospitable court of Menelaus at Sparta, he charms both him and Helen by his many accomplishments. The king, gallant and unsuspicious, and of somewhat easy temperament, as appears from several passages of Homer, leaves him still an inmate of his palace, while he himself makes a
- ↑ It can hardly be necessary to do more than remind the reader how exquisitely this story is told in Tennyson’s “Œnone.”
