The Male Characters Of Euripides by
E M Blaiklock
KING OF MEN
Counting from p. 103
That formula derives from such dramas as the Oedipus Tyrannus, in which a human being, essentially noble, comes to ruin because of a single weakness, and the conception is true to one of the most tragic facts of life. The realistic view, however, can see evil of other kinds, evil more deserving of ruin, evil undeservedly and inexplicably triumphant. Tragedy, to such eyes, can be a page torn from the story of conflict, without beginning, with-out end. So Euripides, pressed hard by circumstance, and denied the wider view of quieter days, looks sometimes on life.
The tormenting present made him both a realist and a pessimist.
Satire comes casily to such spirits. They seek in it a kálapais for their indignation. Hence the dramatic portraits of Menelaus, of Achilles, and of Agamemnon.
As we have said, the last named appears first in the Hecuba.
He is shown contemptible and weak. Euripides was not un-reasonable in regarding it as a fundamental certainty that the man who could harden his heart to the Aulis crime must necessarily have been a weakling. Hardness need not rise from strength of character. That error belongs to the psycho-logy of Prussianism, discredited last century at Nuremberg after WW2, and the fact that Euripides saw and underlined the truth says a good deal for his understanding. Hence the representation of
an Agamemnon who could slay his child, and callously deceive his wife, but a personality incapable of the true strength of self-sacrifice. Such fortitude is left to Polyxena and Iphigenia.
The King of Men, in contrast, is eaten by personal ambition, afraid of the army he professes to lead, and nervous of that astute politician Odysseus, whose cool opposition so often damages his royal dignity. Euripides had seen such men lead armies. He had seen such politicians manipulate the assembly behind the soldiers' backs.
To watch what the Hecuba does to Agamemnon is, of course, to deal with only one aspect of the tragedy. The aged queen is the dominant figure of its drama. The brutalisation of her character by sorrow on sorrow is the unifying theme of the play, and both Prologue and Parodos with their story and lamentation set the stage. A vision of the old woman's overwhelming sorrow is made to precede the Chorus' excited account of the scene in the Greek assembly. The audience know that two more hammer blows are to fall on this broken heart. One, in Euripides' intention, is to exalt, and one to crush her. There is purpose, then, in the revelation of Hecuba's utter grief at the drama's opening. The account of the debate reproduces the familiar picture of half-democratic discussion found in Homer's accounts of the counsels of epic chiefs.
Euripides uses it to suggest the male background of Hecuba's sufferings, deliberately suggests a contemporary parallel by the introduction of two Athenians urgent for the blood of human sacritice, and proceeds to fling a shrewd shaft against the demagogues of recent history. Perhaps he had Mitylene, and two famous debates in mind. Cleon's triumph, too, in the Pylos affair, was only a year old, and Euripides is not likely to have been more sympathetic towards that noisy politician than either Aristophanes or Thucydides was. Odysseus, 'the wily wrangler, the fair-speeched panderer to the mob' (11. I3I-
133), can hardly be other than an echo of fifth-century politics.
The very definite attack on certain features of democracy which marks the play, is a significant indication of what the war was doing to thoughtful Athenians. There is no little acrimony in the assault, which emerges notably at two other points in the play. 'Yours is a thankless generation,' cries Hecuba at 1. 254, 'who yearn with striving for the honours of the demagogue. May I never know you who shrink not from harming your friends if so you may speak that which gratifies the mob.' Again at ii 605, 606 she says with bitterness, "The common folk are wanton, and lawlessness in a sailor crowd spreads swifter than fire. This is the same dislike which is expressed eighteen years later in the Orestes.
Thanks for reading my book, tomorrow we will continue from page 105.