I.

ONCE UPON A TIME.



Once upon a time, there lived in a city of Asia Minor, not far from
Mount Ida, as old Homer tells us in his grand and beautiful poem, a
king who had fifty sons and many daughters. How large his family was,
indeed, we cannot say, for the storytellers of the olden time were not
very careful to set down the actual and exact truth, their chief object
being to give the people something to interest them. That they
succeeded well in this respect we know, because the story of this old
king and his great family of sons and daughters has been told and
retold thousands of times since it was first related, and that was so
long ago that the bard himself has sometimes been said never to have
lived at all. Still; somebody must have existed who told the wondrous
story, and it has always been attributed to a blind poet, to whom the
name Homer has been given.

The place in which the old king and his great family lived was Ilium,
though it is better known as Troja or Troy, because that is the name
that the Roman people used for it in later times. One of the sons of
Priam, for that was the name of this king, was Paris, who, though very
handsome, was a wayward and troublesome youth. He once journeyed to
Greece to find a wife, and there fell in love with a beautiful daughter
of Jupiter, named Helen. She was already married to Menelaus, the
Prince of Lacedæmonia (brother of another famous hero, Agamemnon), who