Euripides’ Helen: A Pseudo-Tragedy
Euripides’ Helen occupies a singular position among the plays of the “dark tragedian” of Greek drama. Often considered as a “light” play of the celebrated dramatist, the play gives us a totally divergent take on the traditional story of the abduction of Helen by Paris (or, the elopement of Helen with Paris).
According to the conventional version, Helen, daughter of Zeus, by either Leda or Nemesis, chooses Menelaus as her husband from among all the suitors that had come for her hand. She falls in love and flees with Paris to Troy during one of Menelaus’ absences. After the death of Paris in the Trojan War, she marries his brother, Deiphobus, whom she promptly betrays to Menelaus, the victor in the Trojan War, and lives happily ever after in Sparta with her first husband till their deaths.
Euripides based his recasting of the story of Helen on the observations of the historian Herodotus, who had earlier argued that the real Helen was actually whisked away to Egypt and hidden there, while Paris apparently took a phantom look-alike to Troy. While Helen safely pined away in Egypt, the phantom-Helen was hated and reviled by the Greeks and Trojans alike for betraying her husband and for being the cause of the bloody Trojan War.
The adultery of Helen and her betrayal of the Greeks, which unleashed the awesome carnage of the Trojan War, rankled heavily on the Greek consciousness for centuries. It was left to Herodotus and Euripides to rescue the reputation of Helen and, consequently, to defend the nobility of the Greek character. Hence the creation of “a breathing phantom [Helen look-alike] shaped from nothingness.”
The creation and portrayal of the phantom-Helen by Euripides was a deviation from the general world-view and dramatic style of the iconoclastic tragedian who had a penchant to often mock the gods, as well as to delineate his characters realistically. This “too-modern-for-his-time” feature in the works of Euripides has often been compared to that of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
By no stretch of imagination can the play Helen be called a tragedy. It has been characterized by various commentators as “romantic drama” or “tragi-comedy.” I would like to regard this play as a “pseudo-tragedy.” The “tragedy” in this play may refer to the sufferings undergone by the protagonists in particular, as well as the general “tragedy” of the Greeks who had been precipitated into the Trojan War by the supposed infidelity and betrayal of the phantom-Helen. The soliloquies of (the real) Helen and Menelaus in the play amply depict the misery endured by the protagonists. Helen has been wretchedly languishing in Egypt for years. At the beginning of the play, when she is informed by the Greek exile Teukros that Menelaus has perished, Helen becomes vulnerable to the threat of a forced marriage to Theoclymenes, the present king of Egypt. Meanwhile, Menelaus endures further suffering after the destruction of Troy, having to wander the Aegean for over 10 years with his phantom-wife (unbeknownst to him), and finally being shipwrecked off the coast of Egypt and facing capture and execution by the Egyptians.
It is in this context that the fairly simple and “light” plot of the play unfolds. In his celebrated tragedies – like Medea, Hippolytus, and Electra – Euripides uses incisive realism to depict the unruly passions and actions of his characters, and the ineluctable consequences attendant upon them. He uses the technique of divine intervention – the deus ex machina – only as a climactic device for the resolution of the drama. In Helen, on the contrary, the tables are turned. The protagonists find themselves in their predicament not because of the result of their own actions, but as a consequence of the machinations of the gods. And the resolution out of their predicament is not through the device of deus ex machina, but through their own amusingly clever trick practiced on the gullible Theoclymenes with the connivance of the king’s sister, the virgin prophetess Theonoe.
One of the unarguably hilarious moments in the play occurs when Menelaus and the genuine Helen recognize each other. Menelaus’ primary concern at that moment is the chastity of his wife during her long, forced exile in Egypt. This is a little surprising and rather ungracious attitude on the part of Menelaus who had no qualms about taking back the adulterous phantom-Helen who had cheerfully shared the bed of both Paris and his brother Deiphobus.
Euripides’ attempt in this play to assert the honor of the Greeks leads him on to make some uncharitable remarks about the Egyptians who are glibly dismissed as “barbarians.” That is a little surprising, as the Classical Greek civilization owes much to the more ancient Egyptian civilization, a debt acknowledged by many famous Greek thinkers and writers of antiquity. Menelaus’ blatant braggadocio is rather amusing when he vows to fight to death the Egyptian king and defend the honor of his newly-found wife, when the odds are really stacked against them. However, the realism and modesty of Helen finally persuades her husband to resort to the clever subterfuge suggested by Helen.
Euripides takes this occasion to express some genuine anti-war sentiments, something that should strike a sympathetic cord with contemporary readers. He makes the Chorus utter the following modern-sounding words:
“Oh why, oh why do heroes try to prove their excellence in war?
As if a spear could guard a man from the onslaught of life’s pain.
Strife will be with us forever if blood is the criterion…”
In the final analysis, the play Helen should be taken as a light-hearted play which Euripides wrote for mainly patriotic reasons, that stands apart from his great, dark tragedies, and that allowed the skill of the dramatist to effectively tell an oft-told tale in an iconoclastic way. The Euripides-as-pure-tragedian school will find this entertaining play disappointing and distracting. But nothing can detract from the excellence and appeal of this charming little comedy-in-disguise.
