of Hector to Andromache, but those of Achilles to Briseis, and of Menelaus to the returned Helen, are full of dignity and attachment.  Briseis was but a captive, yet Achilles viewed her as in expectation a wife, called her so, avowed his love for her, and laid it down that not he only, but every man must love his wife if he had sense and virtue.  Among the Achaiian Greeks monogamy is invariable; divorce unknown; incest abhorred....  The sad institution which, in Saint Augustine’s time, was viewed by him as saving the world from yet worse evil is unknown or unrecorded.  Concubinage prevails in the camp before Troy, but only simple concubinage.  Some of the women, attendants in the Ithacan palace, were corrupted by the evil-minded Suitors; but some were not.  It should, perhaps, be noted as a token of the respect paid to the position of the woman, that these very bad men are not represented as ever having included in their plans the idea of offering violence to Penelope.  The noblest note, however, of the Homeric woman remains this, that she shared the thought and heart of her husband:  as in the fine utterance of Penelope she prays that rather she may be borne away by the Harpies than remain to ’glad the heart of a meaner man’ (Od.  XX., 82) than her husband, still away from her.”

Only a careful student of Homer can quite realize the diplomatic astuteness which inspired this sketch of Homeric morals.  Its amazing sophistry can, however, be made apparent even to one who has never read the Iliad and the Odyssey.

ACHILLES AS A LOVER

The Trojan War lasted ten years.  Its object was to punish Paris, son of the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and taking away a shipload of treasures to boot.  The subject of Homer’s Iliad is popularly supposed to be this Trojan War; in reality, however, it covers less than two months (fifty-two days) of those ten years, and its theme, as the first lines indicate, is the wrath of Achilles—­the ruinous wrath, which in the tenth year, brought on the other Greek warriors woes innumerable.  Achilles had spent much of the intervening time in ravaging twelve cities of Asia Minor, carrying away treasures and captive women, after the piratical Greek custom.  One of these captives was Briseis, a high priest’s daughter, whose husband and three brothers he had slain with his own hand, and who became his favorite concubine.  King Agamemnon, the chief commander of the Greek forces, also had for his favorite concubine a high priest’s daughter, named Chryseis.  Her father came to ransom the captive girl, but Agamemnon refused to give her up because, as he confessed with brutal frankness, he preferred her to his wife.[295] For this refusal Apollo brings a pestilence on the Greek army, which can be abated only by restoring Chryseis to her father.  Agamemnon at last consents, on condition that some