Odyssey 4.259 · Book 4, lines 259–261
Her heart already turned homeward
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ἔνθʼ ἄλλαι Τρῳαὶ λίγʼ ἐκώκυον· αὐτὰρ ἐμὸν κῆρ χαῖρʼ, ἐπεὶ ἤδη μοι κραδίη τέτραπτο νέεσθαι ἂψ οἶκόνδʼ, ἄτην δὲ μετέστενον, ἣν Ἀφροδίτη
Then the other Trojan women wailed shrilly; but my own heart rejoiced, since by now my heart had turned to return back homeward, and I grieved for the ruin which Aphrodite
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The setting
Odysseus's raid brought grief to Troy. Helen describes the aftermath from inside the city, and then turns to her own divided feeling: by this point in the war she already wanted to go home to Greece and Menelaus.
A note on this passage
Helen splits herself from the women around her. They keen for their dead; she is glad — because, she says, by then she already longed to go home. The confession is startling in a room that includes her husband: she admits she once belonged, in name at least, to the wailing side.
The undercurrent is the word she uses for what happened to her — átē, a ruin or blindness sent by a god. She does not say ‘I chose’ or ‘I sinned’; she says a goddess led her astray. It is a real Homeric belief and also a convenient one. The sentence lets Helen both claim her renewed loyalty and lay the guilt for Troy squarely on Aphrodite, who is named just as the line breaks off.
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