The Male Characters Of Euripides by
E M Blaiklock Continues
From page 113
KING OF MEN
Rhesus is similar, and the likeness, for what it is worth, is a Euripidean trait which may be conceded to the play which bears his name. Both Rhesus and Polymestor, destined to be fooled and ruined by more civilised craft, talk loud and volubly. The tragic irony in their words is of the rough and ready type, obvious to the simplest of the audience. Foreigners were objects of contempt in Athens. That was true five centuries later when Paul of Tarsus found himself promptly tagged with a word from Aristophanes.
Euripides, so wide elsewhere in his sympathies, has not taken the trouble to show the more amiable qualities of the less civilised. The Phrygian in the Orestes is comic. Polymestor, noisy with hypocritical protestations, approaches the grotesque. To what degree depended somewhat on the actor. He says:
Nought is there man may trust, nor high repute, Nor present weal—for it may turn to woe All things the Gods confound, hurl this way and that, Turmoiling all that we, foreknowing naught
May worship them.
(Hecuba 956-96o. Way)
The same irony runs in a double thread through the stichomythia which commences at 1. 989:
H. Dear friend, how well thou speak'st and worthy thee!
P. Prithee, what next art fain to learn of me?
H. If me, his mother, he remembereth?
P. Yea, fain had he come to thee in secret hither.
(Hecuba 990-993. Way)
The irony in this line approaches the gruesome. He had come, down the tide-rips of the Hellespont. It continues:
H. Is the gold safe wherewith from Troy he came?
P. Safe-warded in my halls in any wise.
H. Safe keep it: covet not thy neighbours' goods.
P. Nay lady; joy be mine of what I have!
(Hecuba 994-997. Way)
Hecuba plays with the Thracian and baits him with his greed until he and his children are enticed within. The horrible cry of the blinded wretch and the sounds of murder follow.
Hecuba emerges to tell the story in exultant words, rushing from the tent, hard followed by the victim, crawling, groping, raving, mad with agony. Lines 1056-1083 and again 1089-1106 must have made a peculiarly awful impression on the stage.
The wailing musical accompaniment could have immensely intensitied the effect. King appropriately draws attention to the sudden changes in mood and tempo throughout this monody, the alternating phases of savage fury, tenderness and despair."
Such lack of control, thought the Greek, marked the barbarian. Medea's emotions showed such gusts and calms.
The passage is one of great dramatic power.
To the modern reader the concluding two hundred lines are a lame ending for such a play. Agamemnon enters, quite unfeeling towards his mutilated ally, almost supercilious. He will stand, he says, as arbiter, and justly judge the case. He, Agamemnon, whose taste for abstract justice has already been seen! In one of those set debates which Attic audiences seem to have enjoyed, and which sound so frigid to modern ears, Hecuba and Polymestor state their case. Agamemnon, an little of its dramatic power. Civilised and normal people are prone to imagine strange spiritual powers in the primitive or in those reft of some such physical power as sight. Here was a blind savage, twofold 'fey. Euripides sets out to transform him into an object of pity and terror. He foretells Hecuba's canine fate, then turns on the king. Cassandra shall die.
°This word only (l. 1276) shocks Hecuba out of the species of detachment with which she enquires of her own fate, out of the moral madness indeed which came upon her with her surrender of nobility. Not that, not that-such words upon your head." Hecuba becomes human again, but for what a revelation! J. T. Sheppard puts it well in defending line 1278: "Hecuba's last words are a wild prayer that the Tyndarid woman Helen's sister-"may not be smitten with such madness." The doctrine of revenge has recoiled on Hecuba herself. In Cassandra's fate Polymestor will be avenged.
After that Hecuba remains transfixed in tragic silence. Agamemnon may bluster and order the Thracian to a desert island; the Trojan women are marshalled for the voyage to captivity. But we see Hecuba still, hardly human, on the brink of the final trans-formation, yet human enough to feel the sting of this last, worst grief."