Homer always escapes our psychological problems by throwing the weight of our deeds and misdeeds on a God or a Goddess, or on destiny.  To have fled from her lord and her one child, Hermione, was not in keeping with the character of Helen as Homer draws it.  Her repentance is almost Christian in its expression, and repentance indicates a consciousness of sin and of shame, which Helen frequently professes.  Thus she, at least, does not, like Homer, in his chivalrous way, throw all the blame on the Immortals and on destiny.  The cheerful acquiescence of Helen in destiny makes part of the comic element in La Belle Helene, but the mirth only arises out of the incongruity between Parisian ideas and those of ancient Greece.

Helen is freely and bitterly blamed in the “Odyssey” by Penelope, chiefly because of the ruinous consequences which followed her flight.  Still, there is one passage, when Penelope prudently hesitates about recognising her returned lord, which makes it just possible that a legend chronicled by Eustathius was known to Homer,—­namely, the tale already mentioned, that Paris beguiled her in the shape of Menelaus.  The incident is very old, as in the story of Zeus and Amphitryon, and might be used whenever a lady’s character needed to be saved.  But this anecdote, on the whole, is inconsistent with the repentance of Helen, and is not in Homer’s manner.

The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have written harshly against Helen.  She punished him by blindness, and he indited a palinode, explaining that it was not she who went to Troy, but a woman fashioned in her likeness, by Zeus, out of mist and light.  The real Helen remained safely and with honour in Egypt.  Euripides has made this idea, which was calculated to please him, the groundwork of his “Helena,” but it never had a strong hold on the Greek imagination.  Modern fancy is pleased by the picture of the cloud-bride in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for a phantasm.  “Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue.”

Concerning the later feats, and the death of Paris, Homer says very little.  He slew Achilles by an arrow-shot in the Scaean gate, and prophecy was fulfilled.  He himself fell by another shaft, perhaps the poisoned shaft of Philoctetes.  In the fourth or fifth century of our era a late poet, Quintus Smyrnaeus, described Paris’s journey, in quest of a healing spell, to the forsaken OEnone, and her refusal to aid him; her death on his funeral pyre.  Quintus is a poet of extraordinary merit for his age, and scarcely deserves the reproach of laziness affixed on him by Lord Tennyson.

On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-contemptuous liking for the beautiful Paris.  Later art represents him as a bowman of girlish charms, wearing a Phrygian cap.  There is a late legend that he had a son, Corythus, by OEnone, and that he killed the lad in a moment of jealousy, finding him with Helen and failing to recognise him.  On the death of Paris, perhaps by virtue of the custom of the Levirate, Helen became the wife of his brother, Deiphobus.