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54 grave and reverend seniors, men of cold passions and calm judgment, fathers whose sons were righting and falling for this woman's sake, and even Priam himself, whose very crown and kingdom she had brought in deadly peril. He receives her, as she draws near, with gentle courtesy. Plainly, in his estimation, her unhappy position does not involve necessarily shame or disgrace. This opens one of the difficult questions of the moral doctrine of the Iliad, which can only be understood by bearing in mind the supernatural machinery of the poem. To the modern reader, the character of Helen, and the light in which she is regarded alike by Greeks and Trojans, present an anomaly in morals which is highly unsatisfactory. It is not as if Homer, like the worst writers of the Italian school, set marriage vows at nought, and made a jest of unchastity. Far otherwise; the heathen bard on such points took an infinitely higher tone than many so-called Christian poets. The difficulty lies in the fact that throughout the poem, while the crime is reprobated, the criminal meets with forbearance, and even sympathy. Our first natural impulse with regard to Helen is to look upon her much in the light in which she herself, in one of her bitter confessions, says she is looked upon by the mass of the Trojans:—

But this feeling, we must remember, arose much more from her being the cause of all the miseries of the siege, than from her having left her Greek husband. Priam and Hector—who have certainly not a lower morality, and a higher nobility and unselfishness, than