The Trojan women of Euripides Part 15

[36] Menelaus and Helen.]--The meeting of Menelaus and Helen after the taking of Troy was naturally one of the great moments in the heroic legend. The versions, roughly speaking, divide themselves into two. In one (_Little Iliad_, Ar. _Lysistr_. 155, Eur. _Andromache_ 628) Menelaus is about to kill her, but as she bares her bosom to the sword, the sword falls from his hand. In the other (Stesichorus, _Sack of Ilion_ (?)) Menelaus or some one else takes her to the ships to be stoned, and the men cannot stone her. As Quintus of Smyrna says, "They looked on her as they would on a G.o.d!"

Both versions have affected Euripides here. And his Helen has just the magic of the Helen of legend. That touch of the supernatural which belongs of right to the Child of Heaven--a mystery, a gentleness, a strange absence of fear or wrath--is felt through all her words. One forgets to think of her guilt or innocence; she is too wonderful a being to judge, too precious to destroy. This supernatural element, being the thing which, if true, separates Helen from other women, and in a way redeems her, is for that reason exactly what Hecuba denies. The controversy has a certain eternal quality about it: the hypothesis of heavenly enchantment and the hypothesis of mere bad behaviour, neither of them entirely convincing! But the very curses of those that hate her make a kind of superhuman atmosphere about Helen in this play; she fills the background like a great well-spring of pain.

This Menelaus, however, is rather different from the traditional Menelaus. Besides being the husband of Helen, he is the typical Conqueror, for whose sake the Greeks fought and to whom the central prize of the war belongs. And we take him at the height of his triumph, the very moment for which he made the war! Hence the peculiar bitterness with which he is treated, his conquest turning to ashes in his mouth, and his love a confused turmoil of hunger and hatred, contemptible and yet terrible.

The exit of the scene would leave a modern audience quite in doubt as to what happened, unless the action were much clearer than the words. But all Athenians knew from the _Odyssey_ that the pair were swiftly reconciled, and lived happily together as King and Queen of Sparta.

[37] Thou deep base of the world.]--These lines, as a piece of religious speculation, were very famous in antiquity. And dramatically they are most important. All through the play Hecuba is a woman of remarkable intellectual power and of fearless thought. She does not definitely deny the existence of the Olympian G.o.ds, like some characters in Euripides, but she treats them as beings that have betrayed her, and whose name she scarcely deigns to speak. It is the very G.o.dlessness of Hecuba's fort.i.tude that makes it so terrible and, properly regarded, so n.o.ble.

(Cf. p. 35 "Why call on things so weak?" and p. 74 "They know, they know....") Such G.o.ds were as a matter of fact the moral inferiors of good men, and Euripides will never blind his eyes to their inferiority.

And as soon as people see that their G.o.d is bad, they tend to cease believing in his existence at all. (Hecuba's answer to Helen is not inconsistent with this, it is only less characteristic.)

Behind this Olympian system, however, there is a possibility of some real Providence or impersonal Governance of the world, to which here, for a moment, Hecuba makes a pa.s.sionate approach. If there is _any_ explanation, _any_ justice, even in the form of mere punishment of the wicked, she will be content and give worship! But it seems that there is not. Then at last there remains--what most but not all modern freethinkers would probably have begun to doubt at the very beginning--the world of the departed, the spirits of the dead, who are true, and in their dim way love her still (p. 71 "Thy father far away shall comfort thee," and the last scene of the play).

This last religion, faint and shattered by doubt as it is, represents a return to the most primitive "Pelasgian" beliefs, a worship of the Dead which existed long before the Olympian system, and has long outlived it.

[38] The fire-brand's image.]--Hecuba, just before Paris' birth, dreamed that she gave birth to a fire-brand. The prophets therefore advised that the babe should be killed; but Priam disobeyed them.

[39] Three Crowns of Life.]--On the Judgment of Paris see Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena_. pp. 292 ff. Late writers degrade the story into a beauty contest between three thoroughly personal G.o.ddesses--and a contest complicated by bribery. But originally the Judgment is rather a Choice between three possible lives, like the Choice of Heracles between Work and Idleness. The elements of the choice vary in different versions: but in general Hera is royalty; Athena is prowess in war or personal merit; Aphrodite, of course, is love. And the G.o.ddesses are not really to be distinguished from the gifts they bring. They are what they give, and nothing more. Cf. the wonderful lyric _Androm_. 274 ff., where they come to "a young man walking to and fro alone, in an empty hut in the firelight."

There is an extraordinary effect in Helen herself _being_ one of the Crowns of Life--a fair equivalent for the throne of the world.

[40] Alexander ... Paris.]--Two plays on words in the Greek.

[41] The old Gate-Warden.]--He and the Watchers are, of course, safely dead. But on the general lines of the tradition it may well be that Helen is speaking the truth. She loved both Menelaus and Paris; and, according to some versions, hated Deiphobus, the Trojan prince who seized her after Paris' death. There is a reference to Deiphobus in the MSS. of the play here, but I follow Wilamowitz in thinking it spurious.

[42] Chorus.]--On the Trojan Zeus see above, on p. 11. Mount Ida caught the rays of the rising sun in some special manner and distributed them to the rest of the world; and in this gleam of heavenly fire the G.o.d had his dwelling, which is now the brighter for the flames of his City going up like incense!

Nothing definite is known of the Golden Images and the Moon-Feasts.

[43] Towers of the Giants.]--The pre-historic castles of Tiryns and Mycenae.

[44] May Helen be there.]--(Cf. above.) Pitane was one of the five divisions of Sparta. Athena had a "Bronzen House" on the acropolis of Sparta. Simos, of course, the river of Troy.

[45] I make thee whole.]--Here as elsewhere Hecuba fluctuates between fidelity to the oldest and most instinctive religion, and a rejection of all G.o.ds.

[46] Lo, I have seen the open hand of G.o.d.]--The text is, perhaps, imperfect here; but Professor Wilamowitz agrees with me that Hecuba has seen something like a vision. The meaning of this speech is of the utmost importance. It expresses the inmost theme of the whole play, a search for an answer to the injustice of suffering in the very splendour and beauty of suffering. Of course it must be suffering of a particular kind, or, what comes to the same thing, suffering borne in a particular way; but in that case the answer seems to me to hold. One does not really think the world evil because there are martyrs or heroes in it.

For them the elements of beauty which exist in any great trial of the spirit become so great as to overpower the evil that created them--to turn it from shame and misery into tragedy. Of course to most sufferers, to children and animals and weak people, or those without inspiration, the doctrine brings no help. It is a thing invented by a poet for himself.

[47] Thou of the Ages.]--The Phrygian All-Father, identified with Zeus, son of Kronos. (Cf. on p. 11.)

[48] Now hast thou found thy prayer.]--The G.o.ds have deserted her, but she has still the dead. (Cf. above, on p. 71.)

[49] Forth to the dark Greek ships.]--Curiously like another magnificent ending of a great poem, that of the _Chanson de Roland_, where Charlemagne is called forth on a fresh quest:

"Deus," dist li Reis, "si penuse est ma vie!"

Pluret des oilz, sa barbe blanche tiret....