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.
How her reconciliation with Menelaus was brought about we do not learn
from Homer, who, in the "Odyssey," accepts it as a fact. The earliest
traditional hint on the subject is given by the famous "Coffer of
Cypselus," a work of the seventh century, B.
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