Other versions were afterward started, forming a sort of compromise between Homer and Stesichorus, admitting that Helen had never really been at Troy, without altogether denying her elopement.  Such is the story of her having been detained in Egypt during the whole term of the siege.  Paris, on his departure from Sparta, had been driven thither by storms, and the Egyptian king Proteus, hearing of the grievous wrong which he had committed toward Menelaus, had sent him away from the country with severe menaces, detaining Helen until her lawful husband should come to seek her.  When the Greeks reclaimed Helen from Troy, the Trojans assured them solemnly that she neither was nor ever had been in the town; but the Greeks, treating this allegation as fraudulent, prosecuted the siege until their ultimate success confirmed the correctness of the statement.  Menelaus did not recover Helen until, on his return from Troy, he visited Egypt.  Such was the story told by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, and it appeared satisfactory to his historicizing mind.  “For if Helen had really been at Troy,” he argues, “she would certainly have been given up, even had she been mistress of Priam himself instead of Paris:  the Trojan king, with all his family and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her:  their misfortune was that, while they did not possess and therefore could not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that such was the fact.”  Assuming the historical character of the war of Troy, the remark of Herodotus admits of no reply; nor can we greatly wonder that he acquiesced in the tale of Helen’s Egyptian detention, as a substitute for the “incredible insanity” which the genuine legend imputes to Priam and the Trojans.  Pausanias, upon the same ground and by the same mode of reasoning, pronounced that the Trojan horse must have been, in point of fact, a battering-engine, because to admit the literal narrative would be to impute utter childishness to the defenders of the city.  And Mr. Payne Knight rejects Helen altogether as the real cause of the Trojan war, though she may have been the pretext of it; for he thinks that neither the Greeks nor the Trojans could have been so mad and silly as to endure calamities of such magnitude “for one little woman.”  Mr. Knight suggests various political causes as substitutes; these might deserve consideration, either if any evidence could be produced to countenance them, or if the subject on which they are brought to bear could be shown to belong to the domain of history.