The Male Characters of Euripides by
E M Blaiklock M A
Helen, conscious of her one weapon, throws herself at his feet.
Hecuba counters her plea with supplication as vehement.
'Enough, old woman,
' says the king,
"I gave no heed to her.'
Does he pause? Is he about to order her death? He continues:
I bid the servants take her to the galley sterns, where she shall sail with us' (1I. 1046-1048).
Hecuba knows from his words and shaken voice that she has lost the day. The passage which follows is, as Tyrrell remarks, 'extremely skilful.' Hecuba pleads, 'Let her not embark on the same ship with thee? Menelaus replies, 'What is she then heavier than of yore?' Heavier! Helen was ten years older. Is it taking realism too far to ask whether Euripides intended a cruel and literal jest, or are the words simply the bitter humour under which Menelaus hides a deep emotion?
Hecuba answers with a line which might have been written high over Euripides' portrait of Helen's husband: 'He is no lover who loves not for ever? Menelaus replies in eight lines his last utterance in the play. They are very carefully written Hecuba's wish is granted. She shall not go in the same vessel.
When she reaches Argos she shall die and be a lesson to other women 'even though they be yet more hateful than she is' (Kâu ET" cơ ¿xOloves. Line 1059).
, Thus skilfully is the king made to belie his resolution in his closing word. Helen, after all, is perhaps not the worst of women!
So ends one of Euripides' briefest and most skilful character-isations. In forty-eight lines the unstable character of the man who took the host to Troy is set before us. Such men, Euripides appears to say, make wars. Such men demand the uttermost of other men’s devotion and self-sacrifice. As a tribute to the fallen he might have punished Helen’s sin. If the act had bruised his passion for her, in it he might have least have shared the loss and sacrifice of all the dead.
His weakness took all meaning from the war. The city blazes. The Trojan women lie in wretchedness. Astyanax is dead. So are countless others. Menelaus has his Helen back and the war!
Menclaus next appears in the Helen. This drama is spoken of as a new playls in 4II B.C. and so may reasonably be supposed to have been written over those grim months which live for ever in the immortal pages of Thucydides Seventh Book. In such a year, and our generation may imagine some of its preoccupations, Euripides made this puzzling play, plagiarising his own Iphigenia, and winning a dramatic success to which Aristophanes' parody of the following year is clear and eloquent testimony. There is a temptation for critics who are bent on relating the play to its historical context to take refuge in Murray's convenient doctrine of 'escapism'. It must at least be admitted that Egypt, at that hour, was a safer land for the imagination to wander in than Sicily.