drew into exile, and soon after died in the island of Scyros. The Athenian people, however, never forgot the benefits he had in his wiser days conferred upon the state; and many centuries after his death, his bones, or some which were supposed to be his, were conveyed to Athens with great pomp, and a splendid temple was erected above them to his memory.
The Lacedæmonian princess who was stolen away by Theseus afterwards became the occasion of a celebrated war. The fame of her great beauty having spread far and wide, many of the princes of Greece asked her from her father Tyndarus in marriage; but he, being fearful of incurring the enmity of the rejected suitors, declined showing a preference for any of them. Assembling them all, he bound them by an oath to acquiesce in the selection which Helen herself should make, and to protect her against any attempts which might afterwards be made to carry her off from the husband of her choice. Helen gave the preference to Menelaus, a grandson of Pelops, and this successful suitor, on the death of Tyndarus, was raised to the Spartan throne.
At this period, in the north-western part of Asia Minor, on the shores of the Hellespont and the Ægean Seas, there existed a kingdom, the capital of which was a large and well-fortified city named Troy, or Ilium. Priam the king of Troy, had a son whose name was Paris; and this young chief, in the course of a visit to Greece, resided for a time in Sparta at the court of Menelaus, who gave the Asiatic stranger a very friendly reception. Charmed with Helen's beauty, Paris employed the opportunity afforded by a temporary absence of her husband to gain her affections, and persuade her to elope with him to Troy. It was not, according to the old poets, to his personal attractions, great as they were, that Paris owed his success on this occasion, but to the aid of the goddess of Love, whose favor he had won by assigning to her the palm of beauty, on an occasion when it was contested between her and two other female deities.
When Menelaus returned home, he was naturally wroth at finding his hospitality so ill requited; and after having in vain endeavored, both by remonstrances and threats, to induce the Trojans to send him back his queen, he applied to the princes who had formerly been Helen's lovers, and called upon them to aid him according to their oaths, in recovering her from her seducer. They obeyed the summons; and all Greece being indignant at the insult offered to Menelaus, a general muster of the forces of the various states took place at Aulis, a seaport town of B[oe]otia preparatory to their crossing the Ægean to the Trojan shore. This is supposed to have happened in the year 1194 B. C.
Of the chiefs assembled on this occasion, the most celebrated were Agamemnon, king of Mycene; Menelaus, king of Sparta; Ulysses, king of Ithaca; Nestor, king of Pylos; Achilles, son of the king of Thessaly; Ajax, of Salamis; Diomedes, of Ætolia; and Idomeneus, of Crete.
Agamemnon, the brother of the injured Menelaus, was elected commander-in-chief of the confederated Greeks. According to some ancient authors, this general was barbarous enough to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, to induce the gods to send a favoring gale to the Grecian fleet when it was detained by contrary winds in the port of Aulis; but as the earliest writers respecting the Trojan war make no mention of this unnatural act, it is to be hoped that it never was performed.
