*22 Helen’s brothers are Castor and Pollux, twin demigods who protect sailors (equated with Gemini, the constellation).
*23 Helen is from Sparta.
*24 Priam is said to have fathered fifty sons (or more by some accounts), and at least a dozen daughters, nineteen by Hecuba and the rest by concubines.
*25 Traditional expressions of grief in Greek society including cutting or shaving the hair, as well as beating one’s breast and tearing the cheeks with one’s nails.
*26 The Chorus are a group of Trojan women. “Semi-Chorus” means that they are divided into two groups for this passage: first, half of the women come out, then the second half.
*27 Hecuba addresses a single member of the Chorus. Choruses often speak as if they are a single individual, while also serving as the voice of a collective.
*28 At this point, the Chorus becomes a united group of singers.
*29 A fountain in Corinth, associated with inspiration.
*30 The region surrounding Athens.
*31 The island of Sicily, south of mainland Italy, was colonized by Greeks from the eighth century B.C. There may be an anachronistic reference here to the Athenian plan, during the Peloponnesian War, to send a naval expedition to Sicily and try to wrest control of the island (the expedition took place, with disastrous results). Sicily is “holy to Hephaestus” because the volcanic mountains of the island were said to be the result of the blacksmith god’s technological workings beneath the earth.
*32 The poet Pindar celebrated many victories of the Sicilian tyrant Hiero.
*33 There is a textual problem in this line. The transmitted text includes a word for “sailor,” which does not make any sense and has been omitted here. The line may be referring to the Athenian colony of Thurii in the instep of the boot of Italy, another suggestion that the Trojan slaves would be better off in Athenian hands.
*34 The value of the river Crathis for dye is attested in other ancient authors, such as Pliny. Crathis is in southern Italy.
*35 Talthybius is the main messenger of Agamemnon’s army in the Iliad.
*36 In this scene, Talthybius speaks in conversational meter, while Hecuba continues to sing or chant in less regular, lyric meter.
*37 I.e. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife and Helen’s sister; she was originally from Sparta.
*38 Hecuba does not yet know that Polyxena is dead, and Talthybius leaves it ambiguous here. In Euripides’ Hecuba, the death of Polyxena plays a large part in the action.
*39 In Athenian tragedy, Odysseus is almost always presented in negative terms (the main exception being Sophocles’ Ajax); he is usually envisioned as a trickster, too clever by half, and a prototype for the contemporary fifth-century figure of the sophistic rhetorician.
*40 The word for “rooms” suggests the innermost part of a house (the women’s quarters); here it is obviously the tents assigned to the women.
*41 Torches were carried at weddings, usually by the bride’s mother; Cassandra’s torch symbolizes her marriage to Agamemnon. Note that this is the first time in the play that Hecuba speaks in dialogue meter: she is no longer singing or chanting, but speaking soberly.
*42 In the original, Cassandra speaks or sings in an excited, irregular meter called dochmiacs. Talthybius continues to speak in regular iambic meter, while Cassandra’s and Hecuba’s speech is in lyric rhythms.
*43 Hymen is the god of marriage.
*44 Hecate is associated with the moon, witchcraft, and fire; the allusion to this sinister goddess may connote death as well as torchlight.
*45 In the original, the cries are “Euhoi,” an interjection associated with Bacchus, god of wine and frenzy.
*46 The laurel or bay tree is associated with Apollo. Cassandra may be wearing laurel wreaths; the reference may also be to the laurel trees that often surrounded temples to Apollo.
*47 Husband of Aphrodite, associated with fire and torches.
*48 Apollo: literally referred to in the original by his epithet “Loxias,” which connotes oracular riddling.
*49 “Than Helen had”—in her affair with Paris, which caused the Trojan war.
*50 Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, will kill Cassandra and Agamemnon with an ax.
*51 Orestes, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon’s son, will kill his mother and will then be pursued by Furies and driven mad.
*52 Literally, she says she is temporarily “outside her madness.”
*53 Agamemnon killed his daughter, Iphigenia, at Aulis as sacrifice to Artemis to bring wind for the Greek fleet to sail to Troy.
*54 Menelaus.
*55 As a libation (liquid sacrifice) poured on the grave of the dead.
*56 Editors suspect that these lines do not belong in the text, on stylistic grounds and also because they seem out of place; hence the angle brackets.
*57 “Achaean” is another term for Greek.
*58 Agamemnon.
*59 She skips the fact that Hecuba will be transformed into a mad dog.
*60 Odysseus.
*61 A line seems to be missing in the original here.
*62 This passage provides a brief synopsis of adventures told in the Odyssey. Odysseus has to pass between the devouring sea monster, Scylla, and the whirlpool, Charybdis; will meet the cannibalistic giant, the Cyclops Polyphemus; Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs; the Lotus-Eaters, who tempt more of the crew to stay eating the numbing plant and forget the journey; and the Cattle of the Sun, which more crew members eat and are destroyed as a result. After consulting the dead, via the prophet Tiresias, Odysseus arrives home to find his home overrun by his wife’s suitors.
*63 The meter changes here to trochaics.
*64 There are traditionally three Furies—the three spirits of vengeance. But Cassandra will also form another trio, along with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, as joint devisers of Agamemnon’s death (which avenges the death of Iphigenia and all his other innocent victims).
*65 I.e. the house of Atreus (the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus).
*66 The wooden horse in which the Greeks were hiding to ambush Troy.
*67 Athena, as a war goddess, loved chariots and horses as instruments of battle.
*68 The “ambush” and the “destruction” are both references to the wooden horse.
*69 The text of this line is doubtful.
*70 Named the Pergamon.
*71 Achilles’ son is Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus), and their homeland is Phthia, a region of Thessaly.
*72 Andromache and Hecuba are singing in lyric meter throughout this exchange.
*73 Hector, Hecuba’s son and Andromache’s husband, the best defensive fighter on the Trojan side, was killed by Achilles.
*74 Paris. Hecuba had a dream when Paris was a baby that was interpreted to mean that he would cause his city’s downfall. But she and Priam could not bear to kill the child, so they exposed him on Mount Ida, where he was adopted by a herdsman and survived—to have his adulterous affair with Helen and cause the Trojan War. The story was the subject of the now lost Alexandros, by Euripides, part of the trilogy in which the Trojan Women was performed.
*75 Cassandra was raped by Ajax (as mentioned in the prologue, line 70); now she faces rape by Agamemnon.
*76 In lines 268–70.
*77 Literally, “I cut myself (for) the corpse,” i.e. Andromache made the traditional gestures of mourning, including beating her breast.
*78 Some editors have suggested that these two lines should be cut from the text, on the grounds that Andromache’s speech is not at all comforting for Hecuba.
*79 “Roll it open” is a metaphor based on the unrolling of a scroll.
*80 The Greek contains a verbal repetition at the end of these lines, 678–79 (diazugei…zugon).
*81 Many editors think these two lines, 742–43, are inserted by a later commentator.
*82 The word used here, barbaroi, usually connotes “non-Greek”; there is a paradox that the supposedly civilized Greeks are not acting in a civilized man
ner.
*83 Helen and Clytemnestra’s mother, Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, was seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, and gave birth to two eggs, from which hatched her four children. Helen was thus supposed to be semidivine, the only female child of Zeus (since her sister, Clytemnestra, was the daughter of the mortal Tyndareus).
*84 “Foreigners” is the same word translated above as “barbarity.” It is, of course, paradoxical in the mouth of Andromache (who is herself a “foreigner” from a Greek perspective).
*85 The elopement of Paris and Helen.
*86 The original meter shifts here to anapests—a rhythm associated with military marching, and therefore a clue that Talthybius and his guardsmen are beginning to escort Astyanax away. I have not written English anapests (two short syllables followed by one long), but I have tried to echo the effect with shorter lines and more syncopated rhythm.
*87 Telamon was prince of Aegina, who was banished to Salamis for killing his half brother and then joined Heracles in his quest to sack Troy after the Trojan king Laomedon failed to reward him with the horses he’d promised as payment for building the city walls. Salamis was one of the main areas in Greece where honey was produced—hence the bees.
*88 Athena and Poseidon had a contest to see which god was more beneficial to the city of Athens. Poseidon, god of the sea, made a spring of salt water burst forth, but Athena made the olive grow, and won the prize.
*89 The text of this line is likely to be wrong.
*90 A river of Troy.
*91 Troy is also called Dardania, after its legendary founder, Dardanus.
*92 Ganymede, a Trojan youth famous for his beauty, was taken by Zeus to be his cup-bearer in heaven.
*93 Love (Eros) is personified: he is the ever-young child of Aphrodite (equivalent to Cupid).
*94 Tithonus, a Trojan, abducted in her chariot by the dawn goddess, Eos, to be her husband. He lived with her forever, immortal but not ageless. They had two sons, Memnon and Emathion.
*95 I.e. now that Ganymede and Tithonus are gone, there are no more Trojans left whose beauty might bewitch the gods and thus save the city.
*96 These two lines, 862–63, may be an actor’s interpolation. Note the discrepancy between the use of the name Helen at 862 and the refusal to say the name at 870.
*97 Literally, “that Spartan woman.”
*98 The Spartans are to be given the pleasure of executing Helen.
*99 Hecuba’s prayer reflects contemporary fifth-century philosophical speculation about the true nature of the gods.
*100 There is a pun in the original on the name Helen, which sounds like the verb “to trap.”
*101 This line may be spurious.
*102 Hecuba dreamed when pregnant with Paris that she was about to give birth to a firebrand surrounded by snakes; the dream was interpreted to mean the child would cause the fall of Troy. Hecuba and Priam did not have the heart to kill their baby, so they exposed him on the mountain by Troy, Mount Ida, where he was adopted by shepherds, who named him Alexander (Paris being his non-Greek name).
*103 In the Judgment of Paris, Zeus was asked to adjudicate which of the three goddesses should be awarded the golden apple of Discord. The god deferred the judgment to Paris, who picked Aphrodite because she promised him in return the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen.
*104 Cypris is a title of Aphrodite.
*105 I.e. Aphrodite.
*106 Catreus, king of Crete, had died (killed mistakenly by his own son), and Menelaus went to his funeral, leaving his wife alone with Paris.
*107 Deiphobus, a brother of Paris and an excellent warrior, was given Helen as a prize of war after the death of Paris. Some editors believe these lines are spurious.
*108 The original refers to a city in Sparta called Amyclae, site of a special cult of Aphrodite.
*109 There is an untranslatable pun in the original, between the name of the goddess, Aphrodite, and the word for folly (aphrosyne). Hecuba is suggesting a connection between the two words, implying that it’s appropriate that the word “folly” and the name of the sex goddess sound alike.
*110 Since women lived in shared apartments, it would have been unlikely for a woman to be abducted without the other women hearing anything.
*111 Helen’s twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, eventually were catasterized (turned to stars).
*112 Prostration—lying down in front of a ruler as a gesture of reverence—was considered by Greeks a mark of “oriental” servility.
*113 Under Athenian law, women who had committed adultery were to be excluded from public activity, but the law specified that they should not be killed.
*114 It is rare in tragedy to find characters making actual jokes, like this one.
*115 A reference to the sacrificial burning of a glutinous mixture of honey, oil, and meal.
*116 There was a myth that Ida, the mountain overlooking Troy, collected rays of light from the sea and formed them into a new sun each day.
*117 Apparently these were crescent-shaped cakes used for sacrificial offerings. It is quite possible that the reference was obscure to Euripides’ audience also—an evocation of an exotic and alien religious practice.
*118 Greek funeral practices involved a ritual washing of the dead body (which of course cannot be performed for those killed in battle); hence, the husband’s dead spirit is wandering, lost, in the Underworld.
*119 The stone walls of the palaces at Mycenae and Argos were supposedly built by the Cyclopes.
*120 A reference to the Acrocorinth, the upper palace or citadel of Corinth, which was on a peak above two harbors, the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs. Pelops, a mythical king, originally came from Phrygia or Lydia (near Troy) but then moved to mainland Greece (the Peloponnese); he was the grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus.
*121 Pitane is a district in the city of Sparta.
*122 Also known as Neoptolemus (the name used in the original); son of the now-dead Achilles. Phthia is the homeland of both Achilles and Pyrrhus.
*123 Acastus, son of Pelias, drove Peleus, father of Achilles, out of his home; he tried to meet up with his grandson Neoptolemus, but was shipwrecked and died.
*124 Editors believe this line to be an ancient commentator’s gloss, not part of the original.
*125 This and other choral interventions in this final scene are in lyric meter, which is intermingled with sections of iambic dialogue meter. Hecuba switches between lyric and iambic meters.
*126 This line is corrupt. The general sense is that the gods meant nothing but pain to Hecuba, or did nothing but make her suffer.
*127 The singular “god” (without definite article) could be Zeus, or some other unnamed deity; Hecuba cannot know which god or gods are responsible.
*128 The last part of the play is all in lyric meter.
*129 Zeus was the father of Dardanus, founder of Troy. The text of these lines is mangled, though the general sense seems clear.
*130 Priam was killed by Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, at the altar of Zeus—hence, it was an unholy death.
INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ HELEN
Euripides took greater interest in the figure of Helen than did his fellow tragedians. Indeed, he was the only tragic playwright, to our knowledge, to put her on the stage, not only in this play but in the Trojan Women and Orestes as well. His unique focus on a woman who, conventionally, had few heroic dimensions reveals much about his innovative, genre-bending technique. Ever since Homer’s Iliad, Helen had been associated in the Greek mind with beauty, sexual allure, and a faithlessness and cunning born of these two qualities. To build a tragedy around such a woman—the polar opposite, in terms of stature, of Antigone or Medea—as Euripides did in 412 B.C. was a daring move, almost certain to produce a play that was not, in fact, tragic.
So it is with Helen, a play that has been classed as comedy, romance, or melodrama, even though it was produced as part of the traditional tragic tetralogy. As he did in other plays—the Alcestis is a
prominent example in this volume—Euripides here pushes the boundaries of the Athenian dramatic forms that had come down to him little changed in half a century of development. The central problem he deals with in Helen is not one of justice or the social order of the polis; after all, he sets his scene in Egypt, a long way from the nearest Greek city-state. Instead, the play is centrally concerned, like many a modern thriller or action movie, with the mechanics of getting away from someone who wants to do you grave harm.
The same problem dominates another Euripidean play, Iphigenia among the Taurians, probably written at about the same time as Helen. The plots of the two plays are nearly identical. Both cast a Greek wayfarer—Menelaus, in the case of Helen—onto the shores of a ruthless foreign king who despises Greeks. The wayfarer miraculously meets a long-lost loved one who is in the king’s power. Together the two plan a ruse that will allow them to sail back to the safety of Hellas. The ending of both plays takes the form of a taut, tense chase, narrated by a messenger since it could not be enacted onstage, followed by the arrival of gods—in this play, the Dioscuri, Helen’s divine brothers—who quell the tyrant’s rage and head off further violence.
Nowhere else in the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy do we find two such closely correlated dramas. It seems likely, moreover, that both were written during the period of Athens’s enormous naval invasion of the island of Sicily, a part-Greek, part-barbarian realm that became an Athenian military target at the midpoint of the Peloponnesian War. The relationship between these two escape dramas and the unfolding crisis in Sicily, where an enormous Athenian-led force became fatally entrapped and unable to escape, is unclear, but some relationship surely exists. Helen, it should be noted, was put on only a few months after the devastating news reached Athens of its armada’s destruction in Sicily.
Though they might have been puzzled by Helen’s novelty of form, the Athenians who attended the original production would have been familiar with its back story. The bizarre plot conceit by which Helen had lain hidden in Egypt while the Greek army fought for her eidolon, or phantom, at Troy was not original to Euripides; a poet named Stesichorus had promulgated this “alternative history” more than a century earlier, and Herodotus, Euripides’ close contemporary, had in part endorsed it (though without mentioning the phantom). An Egyptian king named Proteus, Herodotus claims, had detained Helen, keeping her safe for Menelaus, after the ship in which Paris was abducting her was driven onto his shores. With coldly pragmatic logic, Herodotus reasons that Helen could not really have been in Troy, since the Trojans would never have waged a grinding war for ten long years, as Homer’s Iliad says that they did, rather than surrender her and gain peace in an instant.
The Greek Plays Page 81
