Euripides: ‘Andromache’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says Euripides’ Andromache is not about the universal human tragedy but about the shortcomings of Spartan culture. I think of it as the first critique  of Western nationalism, albeit before European nations were invented.

As Kitto says, Euripides didn’t spin narratives — he worked out ideas. His idea in this play was that the Spartans, with their Sparta First politics, spread misery and suffering throughout any part of the world they touched. Since it’s not a universal human tragedy but a screed against the Spartans, the story focuses on what the Spartans did to one character — and it’s not Andromache. It’s Peleus.

In this story, Peleus is an old man. But when he was young, he was in love with the goddess Thetis. Achilles was their son.

Here’s the progression of what the poisonous politics of the Spartans did to Peleus:

• Arrogance. Spartan arrogance led to the Trojan War, which cost Peleus his beloved son, Achilles. The Spartan Menelaus lost his wife, Helen, to a Trojan prince, and everyone suffered.

• Cruelty. When Troy fell, Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was allotted Andromache as a slave, a “spear bride.” She had been the wife of the Trojan hero Hector. She had a son by Neoptolemus, but Neoptolemus married Hermione, Menelaus’s daughter. Hermione accused Andromache of using herbs and magic to make her barren and unloved, not grasping that her Sparta First personality made her unlovable. When Neoptolemus went to Delphi to consult the oracle, Hermione plotted to kill Andromache and her child. She saw them only as threats to her marriage.

• Treachery. When Andromache hid the boy and took sanctuary in the temple of Thetis, Menelaus came to help his daughter. He found the boy and told Andromache he’d kill him unless she left the sanctuary. When she agreed to exchange her life for her child’s, Menelaus ignored the deal.

• Stupidity. Menelaus’s purpose in intervening was to help his daughter save her marriage. When old Peleus arrived — just in time to save his great-grandson and Andromache — he was outraged. As the words between the two kings flew, Hermione could see that, whatever else she and her father had been thinking, this was not a sound plan for saving a marriage.

Menelaus, baffled that an old man had stood in his way, said he’d come back later and take the matter up with Neoptolemus. But Hermione could see the writing on the wall. With her father gone, there was no one to protect her. She feared that when Neoptolemus returned, he’d either kill her or disgrace her by putting her out on the street.

Fortunately for her, her cousin Orestes appeared. It was not by chance. He had plotted to murder Neoptolemus. He planned to take Hermione back to Sparta, where he would marry her and play a role at the palace.

That’s the cycle: Arrogance leads to cruelty, which makes treachery easy, and then you get so used to bullying and steamrolling people that you do it routinely and mindlessly, until you eventually make a mindless, stupid mistake.

The ancient Greeks, of course, thought in terms of poleis, rather than nations. But I think if they could look at the nationalism sweeping western democracies today, they’d recognize it.

You’ll always find quotable poetry in Euripides. I like these lines, spoken by Andromache to Menelaus, about reputation:

 

Repute! repute! Repute! how you’ve ballooned

Thousands of good-for-nothings to celebrity!

Men whose glory is come by honestly

Have all my admiration. But imposters

Deserve none: luck and humbugs’s all they are.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Andromache is on pp. 240-7. Andromache, translated by John Frederick Nims, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 69-119. The quotation is on p. 86.