Euripides: ‘Helen’

 In this play, Helen is not the hussy who ran off with Paris, starting the Trojan War and bringing misery to mankind. That was an image of Helen, cooked up by the goddess Hera. The real Helen was flown to Egypt where Proteus, saintliest of kings, protected her until her husband could claim her.

As Professor H.D.F. Kitto said, mythology is a kind of make believe, and we are now into alternate make believe. We’ve gone from the stuff of tragedy to the stuff of tragi-comedy. Kitto says we’re close to comedy.

Proteus dies, and his son, Theoclymenus, is as lusty as his father was righteous. As he pursues Helen, the chaste and noble one, Helen’s husband Menelaus shows up, having been shipwrecked. His ship’s lost, but his crew and the other Helen are hiding from the Egyptians, who are known to kill Greeks.

After the obligatory recognition scene — it’s been 17 years — Menelaus has to expand his consciousness. The Helen he dragged away from Troy was an image, an illusion. The universal narrative that his wife was faithless and brought untold suffering on mankind was false. His wife has been true all along.

At first, he just can’t accept it.

 

I trust my memory of great hardships more than you.

 

Once he accepts that he is, indeed, in an altered reality, there are difficulties to overcome and escapes to be made.

The chief difficulty is Theoclymenus’ sister Theonoë, a seer. She must be persuaded to keep silent — to side with Helen and Menelaus against her brother.

The escape is based on a ruse: Helen tells Theoclymenus that Menelaus is just a shipwrecked sailor bringing news of Menelaus’ death at sea. She says she’s willing to marry Theoclymenus — but first she must have a funeral for her old husband. And since the Greek custom is to have funerals for those who died at sea out on the open sea, can she borrow a ship?

The conversations between Helen and Theoclymenus are ironic. She tells him:

 

You shall have me in your house, as wife, to the degree

that you deserve.

 

Menelaus sometimes joins in. It is, as Professor Kitto says, on the edge of comedy. All ends happily — except for the Egyptian seaman who are slaughtered by the Greeks who take over the ship and sail off to Hellas.

Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeuces, who have become immortal, make an appearance to tell Theoclymenus that it’s all the will of heaven. He’s advised to get over it and stop threatening his sister.

It’s all good fun, I suppose. As always, there’s good poetry even in the asides.

I’m tempted to see a lesson about our willingness to believe in illusions even when reality is staring us in the face. Maybe it’s because it’s an election year. As one of Theoclymenus’ servants says:

 

Man’s most valuable trait

is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Helen, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 189-260. The quotations are on pp. 215, 249 and 256.