Seoul Hero

The other day I finished Helen, a play written by Euripides (”Euripides: Heracles and Other Plays,” translated by John Davie with notes by Richard Rutherford). Euripides is my favorite of the ancient Greek playwrights, and I’ve blogged about Euripides’ Heracles, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Ion before, in addition to a small handful of plays by Aeschylus. When one reads a number of works by any writer, one quickly picks up certain themes and motifs that tend to recur. So, for example, it’s astonishing to see the number of love triangles that come up in Dostoyevsky’s short stories and novels. It’s the same situation with Euripides.

In this post, I would like to highlight several typical Euripidian elements: the basic plot outline, the issue of a protagonist’s dual paternity, the role played by intelligent women and slaves, and the issue of divine providence and human free will.

In several plays by Euripides, the two main characters, both belonging to the same family, are separated prior to the events of the play, and, through a fortuitous process of events, perhaps guided by the gods, meet together on or near a shrine or otherwise divinely protected sacred space. They do not recognize each other immediately, and hold conversation together. The recognition of one character by the other is followed by an initial skepticism on the part of the other, whose doubts are eventually overcome, sometimes by a third person, or by asking a series of questions that only the beloved could answer. The two characters, reunited, then leave the confining place where they met, to participate fully in life. This little synopsis paraellels exactly the events of Iphigenia among the Taurians, where the main characters are Orestes and his sister, Iphigenia, reunited in the shadow of the temple of Artemis after such a questioning. It also paraellels very precisely the plot of Ion, where Ion and his mother, Creusa, are reunited within the precincts of the Delphic oracle of Apollo, the recognition there having been helped along by such recognition-questions, and the intervention of the prophetess.

Here, too, the characters, Helen and Menelaus, wife and husband, respectively, are reunited on the site of the tomb of Helen’s guardian, Proteus, the most righteous of mortals, now deceased. Helen takes refuge there as his son, the king of Egypt, Theoclymenus, seeks her hand in marriage, despite her loyalty to Menelaus. Helen, of course, differs in its plot from the usual versions of events in the myths about Helen in that it is explicitly stated that the lover of Paris was a divinely fashioned phantom, while the real Helen was brought to Egypt by Hermes for safe-keeping. While Helen recognizes Menelaus, he is not convinced, not being privy to the same knowledge that Helen is. He is convinced after one of his men sees the phantom rise into the air, proclaiming her real nature. Then Menelaus and Helen, on the pretense of a burial at sea (paralleling the purification at sea in Iphigenia among the Taurians), plan their escape from the clutches of Theoclymenus, who realizes, too late, that he has been duped into letting his quarry leave by ship. Angry, he sets off in pursuit, only to be turned back by the Dioscuri, Helen’s divine brothers, Castor and Pollux, in a typical Eurpidean deus ex machina rescue that parallels exactly the substance of Athena’s words to the barbarian king at the end of Iphigenia among the Taurians, as well as Athena’s role in settling the issue of the eponymous Ion’s paternity.

One of the more intriguing minor motifs in Helen is her dual paternity. On the one hand, Helen claims Tyndareus as her father, even though Greek mythology ascribes the origin of her birth to Zeus, who took the form of a swan in order to trick Leda, a mortal woman Zeus suddenly took a fancy for. Even before I saw the superscripted number indicating Rutherford’s footnote, I immediately thought of the parallel to Heracles, where Heracles’ human relationship with his earthly father, Amphitryon, completely overshadows his more traditional mythological status as a child of Zeus. Although Rutherford does not indicate it in the notes, there is also a parallel to Ion, where Ion, sired by Apollo and raised in the temple, is accepted by Xuthus as his own son at the end of the play–although in Ion’s case the emphasis does not lie on the role of the human father. When giving her geneology, Euripides has his skeptical Helen say: “…my father was Tyndareus. It is true that there is a story that Zeus assumed the form of a swan, flew for refuge into my mother Leda’s lap, where he stole, together with her trust, her maidenhood. Such is my origin, if my tale be true.” Commenting on these lines, Rutherford writes “In the late fifth century BC, rationalizing or demystifying mythology was a common practice among intellectuals” (p. 270). It is precisely this “demythologization,” occuring long before the advent of the Christian religion, that endears to me the pioneering men of Athens.

The role played by women and slaves in Euripides is well known. In this play, it is the sister of the king of Egypt, Theonoe, on whom the balance hangs at the beginning of the climax, as she must decide whether or not to inform Theoclymenus of the planned escape of Helen and Menelaus. Often, it is the female protagonist who shows the greater wisdom. When planning their escape, Menelaus makes a number of suggestions, only to see that they will not work; it is Helen who comes up with the correct plan, just as Iphigenia’s wisdom proves superior to that of Orestes in planning the escape from the Taurian king Thoas. Euripides also likes to place into the mouths of slaves words of wisdom. Helen does not contain the best examples of this, but it is interesting to note the Messenger’s comments about Castor and Pollux. Although they do appear in divine form at the end of the play, one suspects that the Messenger speaks for a rationalizing Euripides when he tells Helen that there are two versions regarding what happened to them: “they are dead and not dead; two accounts exist…Men say that they have been translated to the stars and are gods…[or]…their sister’s conduct made them end their lives with the sword.” While on the subject of slaves, one should note the absolutely hilarious exchange between Menelaus, and the old Egyptian door warden who is not aware of the latter’s identity. The banter, at which the slave woman has a distinct edge, is not incongruous with the Athenian view of monarchy generally.

The final point of discussion I want to touch on concerns the matter of divine providence and human free will. Euripides often brings these two agencies into contrast, and I think I have yet to discuss them properly.

Often in Euripides, as in much of Greek thought, one sees the ascription of the causes of human events to deities, rather than people. Thus we have Helen’s lines at the beginning of the play, in which she explains how she came to be parted from her husband, an ever-present suppliant at the tomb of an Egyptian king:

“Again the plans of Zeus work to reinforce these sorrows. He caused the land of Greece to clash in war with the wretched Trojans, to lighten Mother Earth’s vast burden of mortals, to bring fame to the greatest warriors of Greece. When Trojans laboured in the field of battle and Greeks competed for the prize, it was not for me, they fought, but my name alone. Hermes took me up, wrapped in a cloud, and, transporting me amid the hidden vaults of aether–Zeus had not forgotten me–he set me down here in the palace of Proteus, judging him to be the most virtuous of all mortals, so that I might keep my honour as Helen’s wife unsullied.”

This quote deserves a bit of unpacking. First, it ascribes to Zeus, in a beautiful turn of phrase, the origin of the Trojan war. It also ascribes to Zeus the origin of Helen’s sorrows, as well as the safe delivery of Helen to Egypt. Elsewhere in her monologue, Helen gives the traditional account of the war: three goddesses coming to Paris for judgment in a beauty contest. Rutherford comments that that traditional bit of mythology contains something rather unusual: the goddesses seek human judgment!

In Heracles, and also in Iphigenia among the Taurians, as well as in Ion, the critiques of divinity by humans are much more poignant and important. Heracles angrily says “Zeus, whoever Zeus is, sired me to become the target of Hera’s enmity,” an accusation among a long list of other divine sins articulated very eloquently. Orestes claims that death is better than living a life in which he has been abused by the gods. Creusa has harsh words for her rapist, Apollo. Here, too, however, Helen voices her complaint against the gods, although Helen is much more optimistic than the very dark Heracles, and so the complaints are relatively muted.

Despite these somewhat blasphemous musings, Helen ends happily, with the Chorus praising the providence of the gods:

“Many are the forms the plans of the gods take and many the things they hope to accomplish beyond men’s hopes. What men expect does not happen; for the unexpected heaven finds a way. and so it has turned out here today.”

The chorus’s praising of divine providence also occurs in the end of Iphigenia among the Taurians, and in the latter part of Ion, where the choral praisings come somewhat earlier, after Ion and his mother recognize each other’s identities, but before Ion learns of his divine paternity, while in Heracles, the darkest of all the plays, the choral praise of divine providence comes before the descent of Madness and Heracles’s slaying of his wife and children. Rutherford also notes that similar choral conclusions, the authenticity of which is sometimes questioned by critics, occur regularly in Athenian dramas.

If divine providence is one side of the coin, the other side is human free will. In a remarkable scene at the climax of the play, the prophetic sister of Theoclymenus, Theonoe, reveals that the gods are before the judgment seat of Zeus regarding the matter of Helen: her erstwhile enemy, Hera, wishes her to be reunited with her husband, to spite Aphrodite. It is Theonoe who is to judge between the divinites in a decision that will have earthly repercussions, a scene that “is virtually unparalleled Greek literature,” as Rutherford notes. He further suggests that the best analogy may be Paris’s decision between the goddesses. There is a correspondence here between the opening monologue and the climax. In fact, Theonoe acquits herself admirably and perfectly, her speech touching a divine note that transcends the petty quarrels of Olympus:

“There is in my heart a great shrine of Justice; this is an inheritance I possess … and I will try to preserve it.”

Ultimately, then, Euripides turns his back on the popular religion of the day–and, while still, perhaps, leaving the door open for a truly divine providence, sets the stage for a focus on the role of human actors in time. It is this basic realization that, in what is now an old cliche, “the proper focus of man is man” that makes Euripides as the last great writer of Athens, ahead of his time when he wrote on the matter of divine and human agency.

Helen, then, is a typical, but more optimistic, Euripidean play, in which the playwright uses a typical plot structure and set of favorite humanistically-flavored motifs set against a background of rich mythology to reveal the face of humanity as it should be: powerful, just, responsible, and fundamentally–and deeply–human.

UPDATE: Now I have written a new blog post on the Euripidean satyr play Cyclops.