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A goddess in men's prayers to be |
"Helen a goddess!" say some critics; "the notion is impossible. We have seen her in this same play, a heartless ordinary woman." Yet I think Euripides was serious enough. I do not say he believed either this or any other particular bit of the mythology. But he was writing seriously and aiming at beauty, not at satire. All legend said that Helen was made a goddess; and Euripides was always curiously haunted by the thought of Helen and by the mysterious and deadly power of mere superlative beauty. As Apollo had said to Menelaus (1638):
Thy bride shall be another: none may know
Her. For the Gods, to work much death and woe,
Devised this loveliness all dreams above,
That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof
Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win
Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin.
The superlative beauty may probably enough be found in company with heartlessness and treachery; but cannot these things be purged away, like the hates of Menelaus and Orestes, and the pure beauty remain a thing to pray to and be helped by, much as the
