The Male Characters Of Euripides

The Male Characters Of Euripides by
Professor E M Blaiklock

HELEN'S HUSBAND
Counting from page 85

D. L. Drewi° has suggested a rather elaborate allegorical interpretation. 'Why', he writes, 'all this tale of human misery?
Why is Teucer an exile so embittered that he longs to slay Helen on sight? Why are the homes of Greece stricken past comfort? Why for seventeen years does Menelaus toil by land and sea in armour and in rags? In fact, what have the Greeks been fighting for? For nothing, says Euripides, but a phantom
a wraith.' The Helen in other words is another covert attack on war. Perhaps the enlightened viewed it thus.
The characterisation would not be inconsistent with the purpose. It will be most convenient to deal with it in a brief survey of the play. Following Stesichorus, Euripides makes the real Helen go to Egypt while a mere phantom goes to Troy.
The good king Proteus is dead, and Helen is discovered at the beginning of the play, faced, like Goethe's Iphigenia, with the problem of a barbarian king who desires to marry her. She sits a suppliant at the noble Proteus' tomb,
That, though through Hellas evil fame I bear, Mine honour here may take no stain of shame.
• (Helen 66, 67)
Tí Sột Tu Tê; (L. 50).
She has the promise of Hermes' lips that her happiness and fair fame shall yet be restored. Before such a novel Helen there enters, travel-stained, Teucer en route to exile. His character in his brief appearance is very clearly and vividly outlined. The sight of the woman by the tomb, the woman whose strange likeness to Helen he immediately recognises, stirs him to vehement and passionate expression of his hatred for the cause of all his woes:
Gods, what a sight!-the loathed similitude Of her, the murderess who ruined me
And all the Greeks! Now the Gods spue thee out-So like thou art to Helen! Stood I not On alien soil, by this unerring shatt,
Thou hadst died-thy meed for likeness to Zeus' daughter.
(Helen. 73-78. Way)
Teucer holds the scene in conversation for a hundred lines in which he gives the real Helen the news of her Trojan counterpart. It is a situation full of a rather comic irony. 'The dramatist', writes G. M. A. Grube, "is clearly stressing the improbable elements in the story-the phantom being dragged by the hair and the rest. The aim is not to throw doubt on the legend, for, unless we accept it the play ceases to have any meaning rather he is faced with a funny situation and deliberately dwells on its amusing features.' Teucer's dramatic purposeil is to prepare the way for a situation yet more odd which follows.
He departs with a curse as violent against Helen as that with which he entered, and the stage is clear for Helen's husband.
His entry is, however, considerably postponed. Well over two hundred lines are given to lyric lament between Helen and the Chorus, and to a long oration from Helen in more formal
expression of similar grief. There is a touch of malice in the self-conscious speech which Euripides gives the dolorous beauty. She enjoys her sorrows, as Grube remarks, 'in a twisted sort of way. She even thinks of suicide, but rejects the idea.
One looks so unseemly on a rope (I. 299, 300). By the time she has discussed the dagger as the only elegant alternative, the question has become academic. The poet's purpose in this not very successful scene is difficult to guess. Goethe indulges in a not dissimilar scene at the beginning of his Iphigenie auf Tauris, the object of which is the dramatic presentation of the lonely woman and her problem. It is hard, however, to imagine that Euripides was seriously building a character out of Helen. Perhaps he is doing nothing more than clear the coast, and allow a suggestion of time-lapse between Teucer's and Menelaus' arrival. He is not usually, nor is Greek drama generally, so careful of probabilities.
The speech with which the king enters reads like a prologue, but it is thoroughly in character. He is the Menelaus of the Orestes, insincere as well as weak. He begins with formal wishes never to have been born, but the mention of his brother's name reminds him that they,
"famed team', had captained 'the
mightiest host of all'. No 'mere boasting', look you, to say this. They were, moreover, volunteers, true democrats, those others who followed their marshal to Troy. (Agamemnon is forgotten.) To get this speech into the correct perspective it must be remembered that the king stood in salty rags, in such attire as raised all Aristophanes' wrath. The boasts of this unheroic figure are comically incongruous. As yet he does not know where he is cast ashore. He has been ashamed to seek out the inhabitants and ask of them. For,
in mine ill plight
I hide for shame my misery; for a man Low fallen from high estate more sharply feels The strangeness of it than the long unblest.
Want wasteth me; for neither food have I Nor raiment for my body,-judge by these That gird me, rags washed shoreward from the ship.
The robes once mine, bright vest and bravery, The sea hath swallowed.
(Helen 4I6-424. Way)

No Athenian could help remembering another naked and shipwrecked hero. Odysseus was in more evil case when he emerged from his thicket, but in spite of the audience, he managed a much more epic dignity. Indeed,
Bi S "NEV CUS TE NÉWU OpEriTPOCOS, aNKi TIETTOLOÚS." (Interpretation needed here please)
Realism can be used as parody. It is difficult to see how W. N.
Bates can see any resemblance to the Homeric Menelaus in this caricature.
From this point, at least, the action approaches very close to comedy. Menelaus, 'renowned in every land' (1. 504), is driven like a beggar from the door by an old woman's anger. 'Yes, old woman, yes indeed. You are quite right. You may say so, I'll obey you, but let me speak.' 'Go away. I have my orders, stranger. No Greek must come near this house? 'Hi! Don't touch me, don’t push me’ (ll441-445, Grube).
‘Force indeed’, she answers, ‘shall thrust you hence’ At which, alaí, he cries, ‘Where are my famous armies now?’ Surely the audience laughed! "A great one perhaps you were there, but not here, answers the old woman (II. 453, 454). 'Ah fortune!' cries the king (oủk yvwotos ev máon xlovi), 'how unmerited this slight!' He learns then that he has been cast ashore in Egypt.
'Egypt,' he shrills, 'O wretched man, whither have I sailed?'
'And what,'asks the portress menacingly, 'have you against the glorious Nile?' (1l. 461, 462). He hastens to reassure her.
I wasn't blaming the Nile at all. I was lamenting my own fortunes.' The scene might have been written by Aristophanes.
The king is pitiably preoccupied with his tragic change of fortune, but there is nothing Aristotelian about it. His role has seen so maliciously cast that there was no pity or tear in the contemplation of him. Even the strange tale of the portress concerning one Helen of Lacedaemon shut within, claims only a passing interest. He is soon back to his self-pity. "That a king', he moans, should beg his bread! And such a king-he, in short, who fired the blaze of Troy.' But there he stands who makes such sad lament, iatioppádos in more senses than one.
Euripides aim can hardly have been other than to damage in Menelaus vulnerable person the captains of great hosts.
He treats the Trojan warlord in something of the same manner as Aristophanes treats Lamachus. Or else, is it a fact that 'we moderns', in Gilbert Murray's phrase, 'do not know in what spirit to take the play? The Thesmophoriazusae, as already remarked, is witness to its success. Why, in 412 B.C., was the Helen well received in Athens? It must have been a season of the deepest sorrow and despair. Even if the piece is interpreted as an attack on war, the spirit of it seems unsuited to the day.
The Troades would have been more appropriate. Or would the Troades have come too poignantly home? It behoved tragedians to remember the Miletus.
Meanwhile, as Euripides remarks in the Frogs, 'the drama is proceeding' There follows a most elaborate Recognition, a not very serious attempt at comédie larmoyante. As Norwoods says, 'the possibility of pathos is drowned in absurdity: the messenger suddenly turns to find his mistress smiling at his elbow:
"Ah, hail, daughter of Leda, here you are after all" (ẻvĐá8' noo ấpa. Line 616). If Helen emerges as 'the most insipid of fancies', her husband is no better. It is impossible to see him in a heroic pose, either here or later in the long passage of stichomythia in which he learns his danger. He is so very self-conscious. Helen hears of his adventure with the portress.
That was the very verb Helen used in her question! An Athenian audience would remember the other hero again entering his Ithacan home,
The next fifty lines are quite delightful comedy. Helen raises the embarrassing subject of the Egyptian's attentions and assures Menelaus that all is well! Tís ToûSE TrE; he comments ungallantly, dila yàp, ei oad, léyes. 'What proof of this? Most pleasing tale if true!' Helen, a trifle pained, for we must remember she is not the phantom, pleads her session at the tomb, and a little dexterously changes the subject to that of Menelaus' personal danger. In short, he had better fee. 'What, and leave you? I sacked Troy for you' (1. 806).
The suggestion is unworthy of Ilium. He is all heroic. He will slay the king. He has no flesh, this alien, invulnerable of steel?
Should he, the mighty warrior, let them bind his hands?
Ludicrously enough, twelve lines further on, when Helen has pointed out that his presence can hardly be hid from a king whose sister was in the secrets of the gods, he is worried and pessimistic:
Then must I die for hid I cannot be.
To do what?-to what hope wouldst thou lead me on?
(Helen 824, 826. Way)

Thanks for reading my book, The Male Characters of Euripides. We will continue from Page 90 tomorrow.