The Helena is also a melodrama, and turns upon the adventures of the real Helen, who, according to a less popular myth, was conveyed away and secreted in Egypt, while a mere phantom deluded Greeks and Trojans at Troy. Helen, who is in this play represented as a loyal and affectionate wife, is in danger of being forced to marry the young king Theoclymenus, whose prophetic sister, Theonoe, plays a small but interesting and sympathetic part. Instead of having no prologue, we have in this play two distinct prologues—first, that of Helen, who explains the general situation; and then, after Teucer has appeared and given her vague and gloomy news about the scattering of the returning Greeks, concerning which she and the chorus lament in lyrical strains, we have the prologue of Menelaus. The recognition of husband and wife, the disappearance of the phantom Helen, and the schemes by which they effect their flight from Egypt successfully, occupy the rest of the play. The text comes to us, like some other plays, through one MS. alone, in this case the Florentine C, and moreover in a very corrupt and much corrected copy. To this cause is partly due the neglect with which it has been treated. It seems to have come out, with the Andromeda, in 413–412 B.C., and was certainly ridiculed by Aristophanes in his Thesmophoriazusæ not without some reason. This play may he compared in one respect with the Electra, I mean as regards the curiously free handling of the celebrated legend of the rape of Helen. The version that she had never been in Troy, but had been kept in Egypt, while a phantom Helen deceived both Greeks and Trojans, was first invented by Stesichorus, and was repeated by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus, whose history did not appear till about the date of this play. The palinode of Stesichorus, in which he invented this legend to atone for having offended the heroine, was very celebrated, and is repeatedly alluded to by Plato. Nevertheless it seems very bold to transfer to the national stage at Athens the literary fancy of a few learned men, and in any case tu
