What was Helen of Troy like, really?

Pauline of the Smithereens blog and I agreed some time ago to have a dialog about the Euripides play The Trojan Women. I present her comments about my Helen of Troy post in blue below, followed by my responses.

I could not help but find that Helen got off lightly, had it a little too easy compared to the other women from Troy. After all, she’s supposed to be the cause, the origin of ten years of war, of so many suffering and tragic deaths, but in the end we know that she will survive, while the fate of others is much darker. Of course, Menelaus plans to repair his honor by killing her, but he’s strangely unable to act on this decision. Do you think he’s blinded by her charm and his former love for her? Or is it that if he kills her right now, just at the moment when Troy is destroyed, it takes away all justification of the war and it makes the death and destruction even more pointless?

 Helen does get off lightly, and I think that is an important point about her. The Trojan Women is a play, not history. What Euripides did was to take the known facts about Helen and create a character in the play about whom these facts are believable. What we get is a cold, self-centered woman who is accustomed to getting away with things because she is so beautiful.

There seems to be a Greek tradition that Menelaus was rather dim, more blunder than real force. He did, in fact, go off and leave Helen with a very attractive house guest when he should have known by then what she was like. Further, he turned the expedition over to Agamemnon, then proceeded to second-guess him every step of the way. Whatever his personal deficiencies, he was a Greek male and knew that he had property rights and those rights were violated. When he confronts Helen in the play, he expresses no tenderness or memories of a presumably-happy past. He knows he has the right to kill her, but wants to turn the decision over to others back in Greece.

I don’t remember any instance in Homer where Menelaus expressed concern about the justification for the war and the cruel cost to others, although plenty of other Greeks did. To him the death and destruction were not pointless – they were the recompense he was entitled to.

 I was rather surprised that Helen was so cold, so logic in her defense. She often reacts as if she didn’t care much. In particular, she seems oblivious of the war, of the death and destructions around her, while the other women often describe the fires that destroy their city. Especially, she’s supposed to have succumbed to an irresistible love for Paris, the only justification for all this mess, so it means that she isn’t unable to feel passion. But does that mean that she’s self-centered? Did you believe she’d ever been in love with Paris? Or did you feel she left her husband at the first given opportunity? She expresses no remorse- and yet if she had thrown herself at Menelaus’ feet to ask for his forgiveness I think that he would have felt more hatred and contempt towards her.

 Since the Greeks like logical arguments, Helen can’t just say “let me go because I am beautiful.” No, she plays for time and makes a perfectly terrible case in which everyone else is to blame and she has not been responsible for anything that has happened. As to feelings, I doubt that Helen was ever in love with anyone except herself. Hecuba and Andromache and Cassandra showed compassion for the suffering of both the Trojans and the Greeks. Helen was oblivious. She and Menelaus were well matched.

Do you think it’s her survival instinct that makes her so insensitive? That contrary to Hecuba and Andromache who are grieving the previous, honorable lives, or Cassandra who thinks that suicide might be best, she never had anything but her beauty, she never belonged anywhere, so that she’s ready to play it any way as long as she can stay alive? Do you think Euripides wants her to appear cunning and wicked (as Hecuba describes her), or to acknowledge that somehow she was a victim too?

Helen does have a strong survival instinct, as do Hecuba and the others. Hecuba knows she may survive physically, but the woman she has always been – an honored queen, wife and mother – is dead. She and the other Greek women are grieving for the death of themselves. Helen will do or be whatever it takes to survive physically. As a true psychopath, she has no core of identity to defend. Hecuba, Andromache and Cassandra will be honored in memory, but not Helen.

Helen of Troy: Her Case for the Defense

Helen of Troy by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

In Euripides play The Trojan Women, Troy has fallen, the brave Trojan warriors have been killed, King Priam has been slaughtered and his widow, Hecuba, is rolling in the dust bewailing her fate. Who appears but Helen, the cause of all this ruin. Today she is called “Helen of Troy” but she was originally Helen of Sparta, the wife of Menelaus, before she ran off to Troy with Paris, one of Priam’s sons.

Helen does not know her fate now that Menelaus has reclaimed her, after ten years of fighting and many lives lost. He is a ditherer and decides not to decide.

 I have decided not to settle the fate of Helen here in Troy,
So our mariners will take her with me across the main to Greece.
There I’ll give her over to be killed
By those who are crying avenge their loved ones at Troy.

Hecuba warns him this will not work out.

 I approve, Menelaus, of your killing your wife,
But don’t let her near you or she’ll entangle you again.

When Helen realizes that no final decision has been reached, she appeals to the Greek love of a discussion.

 HELEN: Am I not at least to have the chance of showing that if I die I die unjustly?
MENELAUS: I came here to kill you, not to argue.
HECUBA: Give her a hearing, Menelaus.

We know already that Menelaus is a bit dim, but Hecuba should have known better. Helen, in her defense, makes the following points:

• It is Hecuba’s fault.

In the first place, this woman here who gave birth to Paris is the one who gave birth to all our troubles.

• It is Priam’s fault.

The second cause of the ruin of Troy, and my ruin too, was old Priam, who failed to kill the newborn brat [Paris], even thought he had been warned in dreams….

• Aphrodite and Menelaus are also responsible.

He came here with no mean goddess [Aphrodite] in his wake,
While you, Menelaus, my husband you
Criminally left him in your palace,
Took off from home and sailed away to Crete.

• It is Husband #2’s fault.

Ask them how many times they caught me
Trying to slither down the battlements on ropes.
But my new husband, the lately deceased Deiphobus,
Kept me prisoner as his wife despite the Trojans.

Hecuba refutes her, point by point, and Helen is led away to the Greek ships. A modern reader may wonder what the final decision will be, but the Greeks watching Euripides’ play did not have to ask because they knew their Homer. In the Odyssey Helen appears again. In good health and by the side of Menelaus, she politely asks Odysseus about his trip.

Helen is usually seen as young and beautiful but somewhat passive – as in the Victorian-era portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the beginning of this post.

Euripides reminds us that the Greeks saw Helen somewhat differently as, for example, in this vase painting, where she moves purposefully. She is a survivor and knows how to use her beauty get people to listen to her. Her arguments may be bad, but she makes them anyway. Sometimes a bad case is sufficient when you are the most beautiful woman in the world.

The quotations here are from a translation of The Trojan Women by Paul Roche (Signet Classic, 1998) which I find very readable. The language is dignified, although some readers might prefer a more archaic sound.  In translation, we inevitably lose the Greekness of the poetry, but the dramatic tension remains.

New Page: Glimpses of Greece – Ancient Arts

There he is, Zeus in all his naked glory. I have just posted a new addition to the Pages section of my blog. Entitled “Glimpses of Greece: Ancient Arts,” it contains links to the PowerPoint presentations and on-line videos I use in the course I give in the spring of 2011 at Lifetime Learners Institute.

The course offers a quick tour of four of the arts of classical Greece:

• Storytelling – myth and legend
• Painted Pots – Greek vase painting
• Classical Sculpture – Hold that pose!
• Greek Theater – then and now

Click here to take a look.

David Malouf, Ransom

Homer’s Iliad tells of Achilles’ rage; it is also the story of Priam’s grief over the death of his son, the noble Hector, at the hands of Achilles. We know of this rage and that grief, but at the remove of centuries. David Malouf, in Ransom, brings us into the experience.

This novel is also a meditation of the meaning of our roles in life: Achilles’ role as a warrior, Priam’s role as king.

My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist–my breath too when talk was needed, because … I have always had a herald at my side, our good Idaeus, to find words for me. To be seen as a man like other men–human as we are, all of us–would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent, so that when old age came upon me, as it has at last, this world would not see how shaky my grip has become, and how cracked and thin my voice. Only that I am still here. Fixed and permanent.

Priam’s permanence as a king has cost him humanity and the power to express his own human needs. He has also lost — or never had — the daily experiences that most men share of work and occasional hardships and doing without. Priam sets out on a journey to ransom his son, accompanied only by a workingman, a carter, and his two mules. He is allowed to be hot, to be hungry, to speak for himself, and to enjoy the talk that is not ceremonial.

Priam was himself ransomed when, as a boy, he was redeemed from a life of slavery by his sister. Priam’s name means “the price”, the price that was paid for his freedom. It is also, ironically, the price he has paid for many years for his kingship, his sons, and now this war. Malouf brings us back to to Homer again because Homer contains it all: a young man’s rage and and old man’s grief.

Euripides, Medea

I have just reread this play. From my experience of it years ago, I mostly remembered the wild violence of Medea, who kills her own children in order to hurt her unfaithful husband. She also murders others along the way: her brother, her husband Jason’s new wife, his new father-in-law. The Greeks permitted fathers to expose unwanted children — the intended fate of Oedipus, for example — so it is striking that the killing of Jason’s sons by their mother is the crime we are expected to be most horrified by.

A father may decide to expose a newborn baby, but a mother probably would not. As a barbarian, Medea violates a strong cultural taboo. Jason says,

Then you married me and bore me children, whom you have now destroyed because I left your bed. No Greek woman would ever have done such a deed.

I can’t decide about Jason. Is he a self righteous prig or a long-suffering injured party? I feel he is both, but that does not make me like him any better. The best way into understanding Medea is to see her as being in such pain that she must attack herself. She knows that she will hurt Jason but that she will hurt herself even more. Still she persists, similar to people who cut themselves, diverting from a pain inflicted by others to a pain inflicted by themselves, a pain over which they have some control. By killing her children she asserts her power in a society that offers previous little of that to its women.

Medea: Of all the creatures that feel and think, we women are the unhappiest species.

Sophocles, Antigone

I thought I knew the story of Antigone, the faithful sister who buries her brother despite the threat of a certain death. What I didn’t know is how powerful Sophocles’ play is, whether you read it or see it.

You want to see it? The 1961 version with Irene Papas playing Antigone is available through Netflix or, in pieces, on YouTube. This movie takes you to a Bronze Age Greece of galloping horses, stone-floored palaces and a gruesome cave. Ignore the subtitles and focus on Papas’ expressive face.

Don’t want helmets and dusty whirlwinds? There is a 1984 TV version with Juliet Stevenson, also on YouTube. This one is done in generic 19th-century dress and a British stiff upper lip.

I also found a high-school version and the Anouilh interpretation in French, written and first presented during the Nazi occupation of France.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where you present it, or when you set it, or what language you speak it in. The ideas don’t change. After she violates Creon’s order,

That order did not come from God. Justice,
That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law,
I did not think your edicts strong enough to overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
Of God and heaven, you being only a man.
They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting,
Though where they came from, none of us can tell.

Oedipus at the Movies

It’s not so simple, taking a classic Greek play to the movies. Like Shakespeare’s audiences, the citizens attending the Greek theater knew the outcome of the traditional stories. They went to see the skill of the dramatist in unfolding the story and the skill of the actors in arousing the appropriate emotions. An important aid to interpretation, for actors and audience alike, were the masks worn by the actors.

Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King by Sophocles has been seen in different media: the play itself, the concepts of Sigmund Freud, the analysis by Aristotle, and an opera by Stravinsky. I chose to watch a video of the 1957 stage production directed by Tyrone Guthrie. The translation used is by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, who has taken some liberties with the structure of Sophocles play. For example, three different translations I have consulted, open the play with the supplicating Thebans and the arrival of Oedipus. He is the first speaker. The video opens, however, with the Thebans speaking of the former king, Laius, and the arrival of Oedipus. This is important information for a non-Greek audience, but it dilutes the impact of Oedipus’ entrance.

Despite the use of masks, many elements of the production violated what I understand to have been the mood of a classical performance. The lighting was dramatic, whereas the plays were originally performed in the open air, in full daylight. The chorus was constantly moving, sometimes rather stiffly and at other times more fluently, with dramatic gestures, whereas a Greek chorus would have been more dignified, more controlled.

The masks themselves were grotesque, which is certainly in the Greek tradition, but did not cover the full face, leaving the mouth visible and probably adding clarity to speech. At times this was a disconcerting animation of the mask. The eyes in the masks were, however, quite effective, although I don’t know how Greek. In all the actors one could see the real eyes moving behind the mask with two exception: Tiresias who is blind and Oedipus who will become blind. The Tiresias costume suggested a bird, with feathered, claws for hands, a beak of a nose and two black patches where his eyes should have been. Within the eye holes of the Oedipus mask, no eyes looked out, even in close up. Oedipus, it appears, was blind from the beginning.

Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy

The stories were old when Homer sang of Agamemnon leading his warriors on the plains of Troy. They were even older when Aeschylus wrote his trilogy of plays, dramatizing Agamemnon’s victorious return from Troy, his murder by his wife Clytemnestra and all that followed from that event.

This edition (translated and with an introduction by Philip Vellacott) of The Oresteian Trilogy includes the three plays: Agamemnon, The Choephori (libration bearers) and The Eumenides (the Furies or “the kindly ones”).

Clytemnestra got a bad rap. First the gods instructed Agamemnon to sacrifice their daughter. As Clytemnestra complains:

Why, once before, did you not dare oppose this man?
Who with as slight compuction as men butcher sheep,
When his own fields were white with flocks, must sacrifice
His child, and my own darling, whom my pain brought forth –
he killed her for a charm to stop the Thracian wind!

Everyone criticizes her for trickery, when it was by trickery that Agamemnon induced her to bring their daughter to Aulis for the sacrifice. And worse follows, as Apollo commands the surviving son, Orestes, to kill his mother, then blames the whole mess on Zeus. Enter Athena, who takes over the situation and holds a trial to determine justice. What may be justice from one point of view may be an injustice to another. Athena recognizes this but casts her vote for patriarchal supremacy:

No mother gave me birth. Therefore the father’s claim
And male supremacy in all things, save to give
Myself in marriage, wins my whole heart’s loyalty.
Therefore a woman’s death, who killed her husband, is,
I judge, outweighed in grievousness by his.

Note the fine print regarding Athena’s own rights. She also shifts judgment regarding homicides from the Furies, the avengers who always obey set rules, to a jury of Athenians who will apply human standards to future cases.

I read the three plays as about an evolution from individual acts of vengeance to civic responsibility for administering justice. The Furies are the emotional response to an injury, a life for a life without regard to circumstances. Athena gets Orestes off on a technicality — Clytemnestra’s life is less valuable her husband’s — but note what she accomplishes. Previously, everyone dodged responsibility. Agamemnon killed Iphigenia because Artemis required it; Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because she was entitled to revenge; Orestes killed Clytemnestra because Apollo commanded it; Apollo commanded it because Zeus prescribed it; the Furies demand blood because those are the rules. Stop! Athena orders. We in Athens, as citizens, will decide these matters and the Furies can become enforcers of what the Athenians decide.