the mass of their countrymen—show no such feeling against her; on the contrary, they treat her with scrupulous delicacy and consideration. So also the leaders of the Greek forces betray no consciousness that they are fighting, after all, for a worthless woman; rather, she is a prize to be reclaimed, and Menelaus himself is ready from the first to receive her back again. How is this? Some have understood the poet to represent her abduction from her home to have been forcible—that she was carried off by Paris entirely against her will; but even allowing this (which is not consistent with many passages in the poem), it would not excuse or palliate her voluntary acceptance of such a degraded position throughout the subsequent story. The real explanation is given in a few words by Priam in the scene before us.
"Not thee I blame,
But to the gods I owe this woful war."
In Homer's sight, as in Priam's, she is the victim of Venus. She is "the victim of passion," only in a more literal and personal sense than we use the expression. Love, lawful or unlawful, was a divine—that is, a supernatural—force, to the mind of the poet. The spells of Venus are irresistible: that fatal gift of beauty is the right by which the goddess takes possession of her, and leads her captive at her evil will. Helen herself feels her own degradation far more deeply, in fact, than any one else seems to feel it; no one uses any expressions about her half so bitter as those which she applies to herself; "shameless," "bringer of sorrow," "whose name shall be a by-word and a reproach," are the terms she uses—
