When this treachery came to light, all Greece took fire with indignation.  The heroes remembered their pledge, and wrath came upon them at the wrong done to Menelaus.  But they were less angered with Fair Helen than with Paris, for they felt assured that the queen had been lured from her country and out of her own senses by some spell of enchantment.  So they took counsel how they might bring back Fair Helen to her home and husband.

Years had come and gone since that wedding-feast when Eris had flung the apple of discord, like a firebrand, among the guests.  But the spark of dissension that had smouldered so long burst into flame now, and, fanned by the enmities of men and the rivalries of the Gods, it seemed like to fire heaven and earth.

A few of the heroes answered the call to arms unwillingly.  Time had reconciled them to the loss of Fair Helen, and they were loath to leave home and happiness for war, even in her cause.

One of these was Odysseus, or Ulysses, king of Ithaca, who had married Penelope, and was quite content with his kingdom and his little son Telemachus.  Indeed, he was so unwilling to leave them that he feigned madness in order to escape service, appeared to forget his own kindred, and went ploughing the seashore and sowing salt in the furrows.  But a messenger, Palamedes, who came with the summons to war, suspected that this sudden madness might be a stratagem, for the king was far famed as a man of many devices.  He therefore stood by, one day (while Ulysses, pretending to take no heed of him, went ploughing the sand) and he laid the baby Telemachus directly in the way of the ploughshare.  For once the wise man’s craft deserted him.  Ulysses turned the plough sharply, caught up the little prince, and there his fatherly wits were manifest!  After this he could no longer play madman.  He had to take leave of his beloved wife Penelope and set out to join the heroes, little dreaming that he was not to return for twenty years.  Once embarked, however, he set himself to work in the common cause of the heroes, and was soon as ingenious as Palamedes in rousing laggard warriors.

There remained one who was destined to be the greatest warrior of all.  This was Achilles, the son of Thetis,—­foretold in the day of Prometheus as a man who should far outstrip his own father in glory and greatness.  Years had passed since the marriage of Thetis to King Peleus, and their son Achilles was now grown to manhood, a wonder of strength indeed, and, moreover, invulnerable.  For his mother, forewarned of his death in the Trojan War, had dipped him in the sacred river Styx when he was a baby, so that he could take no hurt from any weapon.  From head to foot she had plunged him in, only forgetting the little heel that she held him by, and this alone could be wounded by any chance.  But even with such precautions Thetis was not content.  Fearful at the rumors of war to be, she had her son brought up, in woman’s dress, among the daughters of King Lycomedes of Scyros, that he might escape the notice of men and cheat his destiny.