The Trojan women of Euripides Part 14

[1] Poseidon.]--In the _Iliad_ Poseidon is the enemy of Troy, here the friend. This sort of confusion comes from the fact that the Trojans and their Greek enemies were largely of the same blood, with the same tribal G.o.ds. To the Trojans, Athena the War-G.o.ddess was, of course, _their_ War-G.o.ddess, the protectress of their citadel. Poseidon, G.o.d of the sea and its merchandise, and Apollo (possibly a local shepherd G.o.d?), were their natural friends and had actually built their city wall for love of the good old king, Laomedon. Zeus, the great father, had Mount Ida for his holy hill and Troy for his peculiar city. (Cf. on p. 63.)

To suit the Greek point of view all this had to be changed or explained away. In the _Iliad_ generally Athena is the proper War-G.o.ddess of the Greeks. Poseidon had indeed built the wall for Laomedon, but Laomedon had cheated him of his reward--as afterwards he cheated Heracles, and the Argonauts and everybody else! So Poseidon hated Troy. Troy is chiefly defended by the barbarian Ares, the oriental Aphrodite, by its own rivers Scamander and Simois and suchlike inferior or unprincipled G.o.ds.

Yet traces of the other tradition remain. Homer knows that Athena is specially worshipped in Troy. He knows that Apollo, who had built the wall with Poseidon, and had the same experience of Laomedon, still loves the Trojans. Zeus himself, though eventually in obedience to destiny he permits the fall of the city, nevertheless has a great tenderness towards it.

[2] A steed marvellous.]--See below, on p. 36.

[3] go forth from great Ilion, &c.]--The correct ancient doctrine. When your G.o.ds forsook you, there was no more hope. Conversely, when your state became desperate, evidently your G.o.ds were forsaking you. From another point of view, also, when the city was desolate and unable to worship its G.o.ds, the G.o.ds of that city were no more.

[4] Laotian Tyndarid.]--Helen was the child of Zeus and Leda, and sister of Castor and Polydeuces; but her human father was Tyndareus, an old Spartan king. She is treated as "a prisoner and a prize," _i.e_., as a captured enemy, not as a Greek princess delivered from the Trojans.

[5] In secret slain.]--Because the Greeks were ashamed of the b.l.o.o.d.y deed. See below, p. 42, and the scene on this subject in the _Hecuba_.

[6] Ca.s.sandra.]--In the _Agamemnon_ the story is more clearly told, that Ca.s.sandra was loved by Apollo and endowed by him with the power of prophecy; then in some way she rejected or betrayed him, and he set upon her the curse that though seeing the truth she should never be believed.

The figure of Ca.s.sandra in this play is not inconsistent with that version, but it makes a different impression. She is here a dedicated virgin, and her mystic love for Apollo does not seem to have suffered any breach.

[7] Pallas.]--(See above.) The historical explanation of the Trojan Pallas and the Greek Pallas is simple enough; but as soon as the two are mythologically personified and made one, there emerges just such a bitter and ruthless G.o.ddess as Euripides, in his revolt against the current mythology, loved to depict. But it is not only the mythology that he is attacking. He seems really to feel that if there are conscious G.o.ds ruling the world, they are cruel or "inhuman" beings.

[8]--Ajax the Less, son of Oleus, either ravished or attempted to ravish Ca.s.sandra (the story occurs in both forms) while she was clinging to the Palladium or image of Pallas. It is one of the great typical sins of the Sack of Troy, often depicted on vases.

[9] Faces of ships.]--Homeric ships had prows shaped and painted to look like birds' or beasts' heads. A ship was always a wonderfully live and vivid thing to the Greek poets. (Cf. p. 64.)

[10] Castor.]--Helen's brother: the Eurotas, the river of her home, Sparta.

[11] Fifty seeds.]--Priam had fifty children, nineteen of them children of Hecuba (_Il_. vi. 451, &c.).

[12] Pirene.]--The celebrated spring on the hill of Corinth. Drawing water was a typical employment of slaves.

[13] ff., Theseus' land, &c.]--Theseus' land is Attica. The poet, in the midst of his bitterness over the present conduct of his city, clings the more to its old fame for humanity. The "land high-born" where the Peneus flows round the base of Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly is one of the haunts of Euripides' dreams in many plays. Cf. _Bacchae_, 410 (p. 97 in my translation). Mount Aetna fronts the "Tyrians' citadel," _i.e._., Carthage, built by the Phoenicians. The "sister land" is the district of Sybaris in South Italy, where the river Crathis has, or had, a red-gold colour, which makes golden the hair of men and the fleeces of sheep; and the water never lost its freshness.

[14] Talthybius is a loyal soldier with every wish to be kind. But he is naturally in good spirits over the satisfactory end of the war, and his tact is not sufficient to enable him to understand the Trojan Women's feelings. Yet in the end, since he has to see and do the cruelties which his Chiefs only order from a distance, the real nature of his work forces itself upon him, and he feels and speaks at times almost like a Trojan. It is worth noticing how the Trojan Women generally avoid addressing him. (Cf. pp. 48, 67, 74.)

[15] The haunted keys (literally, "with G.o.d through them, penetrating them").]--Ca.s.sandra was his Key-bearer, holding the door of his Holy Place. (Cf. _ Hip_. 540, p. 30.)

[16] She hath a toil, &c.]--There is something true and pathetic about this curious blindness which prevents Hecuba from understanding "so plain a riddle." (Cf. below, p. 42.) She takes the watching of a Tomb to be some strange Greek custom, and does not seek to have it explained further.

[17] Odysseus.]--In Euripides generally Odysseus is the type of the successful unscrupulous man, as soldier and politician--the incarnation of what the poet most hated. In Homer of course he is totally different.

[18] Burn themselves and die.]--Women under these circ.u.mstances did commit suicide in Euripides' day, as they have ever since. It is rather curious that none of the characters of the play, not even Andromache, kills herself. The explanation must be that no such suicide was recorded in the tradition (though cf. below, on p. 33); a significant fact, suggesting that in the Homeric age, when this kind of treatment of women captives was regular, the victims did not suffer quite so terribly under it.

[19] Hymen.]--She addresses the Torch. The shadowy Marriage-G.o.d "Hymen"

was a torch and a cry as much as anything more personal. As a torch he is the sign both of marriage and of death, of sunrise and of the consuming fire. The full Moon was specially connected with marriage ceremonies.

[20] Loxias.]--The name of Apollo as an Oracular G.o.d.

[21] Ca.s.sandra's visions.]--The allusions are to the various sufferings of Odysseus, as narrated in the _Odyssey_, and to the tragedies of the house of Atreus, as told for instance in Aeschylus' _Oresteia_.

Agamemnon together with Ca.s.sandra, and in part because he brought Ca.s.sandra, was murdered--felled with an axe--on his return home by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Their bodies were cast into a pit among the rocks. In vengeance for this, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, committed "mother-murder," and in consequence was driven by the Erinyes (Furies) of his mother into madness and exile.

[22] This their king so wise.]--Agamemnon made the war for the sake of his brother Menelaus, and slew his daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice at Aulis, to enable the ships to sail for Troy.

[23] Hector and Paris.]--The point about Hector is clear, but as to Paris, the feeling that, after all, it was a glory that he and the half-divine Helen loved each other, is scarcely to be found anywhere else in Greek literature. (Cf., however, Isocrates' "Praise of Helen.") Paris and Helen were never idealised like Launcelot and Guinevere, or Tristram and Iseult.

[24] A wise queen.]--Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.

[25] O Heralds, yea, Voices of Death.]--There is a play on the word for "heralds" in the Greek here, which I have evaded by a paraphrase.

([Greek: Kaer-ukes] as though from [Greek: Kaer] the death-spirit, "the one thing abhorred of all mortal men.")

[26] That in this place she dies.]--The death of Hecuba is connected with a certain heap of stones on the sh.o.r.e of the h.e.l.lespont, called _Kunossema_, or "Dog's Tomb." According to one tradition (Eur. _Hec_.

1259 ff.) she threw herself off the ship into the sea; according to another she was stoned by the Greeks for her curses upon the fleet; but in both she is changed after death into a sort of h.e.l.l-hound. M. Victor Berard suggests that the dog first comes into the story owing to the accidental resemblance of the (hypothetical) Semitic word _S'qoulah_, "Stone" or "Stoning," and the Greek _Skulax_, dog. The Homeric Scylla (_Skulla_) was also both a Stone and a Dog (_Pheneciens et Odyssee_, i.

213). Of course in the present pa.s.sage there is no direct reference to these wild sailor-stories.

[27] The wind comes quick.]--_i.e._. The storm of the Prologue. Three Powers: the three Erinyes.

[28] ff., Chorus.]--The Wooden Horse is always difficult to understand, and seems to have an obscuring effect on the language of poets who treat of it. I cannot help suspecting that the story arises from a real historical incident misunderstood. Troy, we are told, was still holding out after ten years and could not be taken, until at last by the divine suggestions of Athena, a certain Epeios devised a "Wooden Horse."

What was the "device"? According to the _Odyssey_ and most Greek poets, it was a gigantic wooden figure of a horse. A party of heroes, led by Odysseus, got inside it and waited. The Greeks made a show of giving up the siege and sailed away, but only as far as Tenedos. The Trojans came out and found the horse, and after wondering greatly what it was meant for and what to do with it, made a breach in their walls and dragged it into the Citadel as a thank-offering to Pallas. In the night the Greeks returned; the heroes in the horse came out and opened the gates, and Troy was captured.

It seems possible that the "device" really was the building of a wooden siege-tower, as high as the walls, with a projecting and revolving neck.

Such engines were (1) capable of being used at the time in Asia, as a rare and extraordinary device, because they exist on early a.s.syrian monuments; (2) certain to be misunderstood in Greek legendary tradition, because they were not used in Greek warfare till many centuries later.

(First, perhaps, at the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium by Philip of Macedon, 340 B.C.)

It is noteworthy that in the great picture by Polygnotus in the Lesche at Delphi "above the wall of Troy appears the head alone of the Wooden Horse" (_Paus_. x. 26). Aeschylus also (_Ag_. 816) has some obscure phrases pointing in the same direction: "A horse's brood, a shield-bearing people, launched with a leap about the Pleiads' setting, sprang clear above the wall," &c. Euripides here treats the horse metaphorically as a sort of war-horse trampling Troy.

[29] Her that spareth not, Heaven's yokeless rider.]--Athena like a northern Valkyrie, as often in the _Iliad_. If one tries to imagine what Athena, the War-G.o.ddess worshipped by the Athenian mob, was like--what a mixture of bad national pa.s.sions, of superst.i.tion and statecraft, of slip-shod unimaginative idealisation--one may partly understand why Euripides made her so evil. Allegorists and high-minded philosophers might make Athena entirely n.o.ble by concentrating their minds on the beautiful elements in the tradition, and forgetting or explaining away all that was savage; he was determined to pin her down to the worst facts recorded of her, and let people worship such a being if they liked!

[30] To Artemis.]--Maidens at the shrine of Artemis are a fixed datum in the tradition. (Cf. _Hec_. 935 ff.)

[31] Andromache and Hecuba.]--This very beautiful scene is perhaps marred to most modern readers by an element which is merely a part of the convention of ancient mourning. Each of the mourners cries: "There is no affliction like mine!" and then proceeds to argue, as it were, against the other's counter claim. One can only say that it was, after all, what they expected of each other; and I believe the same convention exists in most places where keening or wailing is an actual practice.

[32] Even as the sound of a song.]--I have filled in some words which seem to be missing in the Greek here.

[33]Andromache.]--This character is wonderfully studied. She seems to me to be a woman who has not yet shown much character or perhaps had very intense experience, but is only waiting for sufficiently great trials to become a heroine and a saint. There is still a marked element of conventionality in her description of her life with Hector; but one feels, as she speaks, that she is already past it. Her character is built up of "_Sophrosyne_," of self-restraint and the love of goodness--qualities which often seem second-rate or even tiresome until they have a sufficiently great field in which to act. Very characteristic is her resolution to make the best, and not the worst, of her life in Pyrrhus' house, with all its horror of suffering and apparent degradation. So is the self-conquest by which she deliberately refrains from cursing her child's murderers, for the sake of the last poor remnant of good she can still do to him, in getting him buried. The n.o.bility of such a character depends largely, of course, on the intensity of the feelings conquered.

It is worth noting, in this connection, that Euripides is contradicting a wide-spread tradition (Robert, _Bild und Lied_, pp. 63 ff.).

Andromache, in the pictures of the Sack of Troy, is represented with a great pestle or some such instrument fighting with the Soldiers to rescue Astyanax ([Greek:'Andro-machae]= "Man-fighting").

Observe, too, what a climax of drama is reached by means of the very fact that Andromache, to the utmost of her power, tries to do nothing "dramatic," but only what will be best. Her character in Euripides'

play, _Andromache_, is, on the whole, similar to this, but less developed.

[34] In Salamis, filled with the foaming, &c.]--A striking instance of the artistic value of the Greek chorus in relieving an intolerable strain. The relief provided is something much higher than what we ordinarily call "relief"; it is a stream of pure poetry and music in key with the sadness of the surrounding scene, yet, in a way, happy just because it is beautiful. (Cf. note on _Hippolytus_, 1. 732.)

The argument of the rather difficult lyric is: "This is not the first time Troy has been taken. Long ago Heracles made war against the old king Laomedon, because he had not given him the immortal steeds that he promised. And Telamon joined him; Telamon who might have been happy in his island of Salamis, among the bees and the pleasant waters, looking over the strait to the olive-laden hills of Athens, the beloved City!

And they took ship and slew Laomedon. Yea, twice Zeus has destroyed Ilion!

(Second part.) Is it all in vain that our Trojan princes have been loved by the G.o.ds? Ganymedes pours the nectar of Zeus in his banquets, his face never troubled, though his motherland is burned with fire! And, to say nothing of Zeus, how can the G.o.ddess of Morning rise and shine upon us uncaring? She loved t.i.thonus, son of Laomedon, and bore him up from us in a chariot to be her husband in the skies. But all that once made them love us is gone!"

[35] Pools of thy bathing.]--It is probable that Ganymedes was himself originally a pool or a spring on Ida, now a pourer of nectar in heaven.