Thus was Troy utterly destroyed—­the city, the altars and temples, and the population.  AEneas and Antenor were permitted to escape, with their families, having been always more favorably regarded by the Greeks than the remaining Trojans.  According to one version of the story they had betrayed the city to the Greeks:  a panther’s skin had been hung over the door of Antenor’s house as a signal for the victorious besiegers to spare it in general plunder.  In the distribution of the principal captives, Astyanax, the infant son of Hector, was cast from the top of the wall and killed by Odysseus or Neoptolemus:  Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, was immolated on the tomb of Achilles, in compliance with a requisition made by the shade of the deceased hero to his countrymen; while her sister Cassandra was presented as a prize to Agamemnon.  She had sought sanctuary at the altar of Athene, where Ajax, the son of Oileus, making a guilty attempt to seize her, had drawn both upon himself and upon the army the serious wrath of the goddess, insomuch that the Greeks could hardly be restrained from stoning him to death.  Andromache and Helenus were both given to Neoptolemus, who, according to the Ilias Minor, carried away also AEneas as his captive.

Helen gladly resumed her union with Menelaus; she accompanied him back to Sparta, and lived with him there many years in comfort and dignity, passing afterward to a happy immortality in the Elysian fields.  She was worshipped as a goddess, with her brothers, the Dioscuri, and her husband, having her temple, statue, and altar at Therapnae and elsewhere.  Various examples of her miraculous intervention were cited among the Greeks.  The lyric poet Stesichorus had ventured to denounce her, conjointly with her sister Clytemnestra, in a tone of rude and plain-spoken severity, resembling that of Euripides and Lycophron afterward, but strikingly opposite to the delicacy and respect with which she is always handled by Homer, who never admits reproaches against her except from her own lips.  He was smitten with blindness, and made sensible of his impiety; but, having repented and composed a special poem formally retracting the calumny, was permitted to recover his sight.  In his poem of recantation (the famous Palinode now unfortunately lost) he pointedly contradicted the Homeric narrative, affirming that Helen had never been at Troy at all, and that the Trojans had carried thither nothing but her image or eidolon.  It is, probably, to the excited religious feelings of Stesichorus that we owe the first idea of this glaring deviation from the old legend, which could never have been recommended by any considerations of poetical interest.