Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(18)

It is a bracing introduction to the woman who is about to arrive onstage. Before we look at Helen’s response, let’s go back to the very beginning of the war. In fact, let’s go back earlier still, to see how justified Hecabe’s fury might be. What did persuade all those Greeks to set sail for Troy and fight for the return of the wife of a man many of them would never even have met? And how did Helen end up married to Menelaus in the first place?

Ostensibly, Helen’s stepfather, Tyndareus, has a minor role in her story. But if we are to give any single mortal the blame for setting the Trojan War in motion, we might legitimately say it was him. Faced with a flotilla of suitors for his beautiful stepdaughter, he was nervous of choosing one over the others. Kings from all over Greece – either in person or by messenger, depending on the version of the story we read – made their offers for Helen when she reached marriageable age. The offers were all accompanied by gifts, which must have dulled the pain of betrothal admin a little. But Tyndareus could see the risks involved: whomever he chose as the lucky bridegroom, he would be making very many more enemies than friends. And given the power disparities between the suitors – some able to command large armies, others less so – how to pick one without several other mighty candidates either declaring war or abducting Helen? As we have seen, this wasn’t an idle concern: heroes like Theseus and Pirithoos might well have decided that they were entitled to the most beautiful woman in the world.

So Tyndareus came up with a plan. In order to be considered as Helen’s potential husband, the suitors had to pledge an oath (in person, if they had turned up in Sparta to make their case. At home, taken on trust, if they were conducting the whole thing remotely). This story wasn’t mentioned by Homer in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, but it was almost certainly related by Stesichorus in the mid-sixth century BCE, and later writers like Pseudo-Apollodorus also refer to it, with varying numbers and names of suitors.12 Each man had to swear that, if he was unlucky in his bid for Helen, he nonetheless agreed that he would fight for her safe return to her husband, whoever he was, if she was taken away by another man.

The simplicity of the plan was impressive. All those rival claims, all the potential jealousies cancelled out at a stroke: the price for having a chance to marry Helen was defending the man who did marry Helen. Pseudo-Apollodorus also tells us that Odysseus came up with the idea for this oath, and it has the ring of an Odyssean scheme: simple, brilliant, but with a sting in the tail. Once all had agreed to it, either Tyndareus chose Menelaus or, as Euripides and other writers13 have it, Helen chose her own bridegroom. And if every suitor was less than delighted, then at least they could be content that a war of the kind begun by Theseus with the Dioscuri had been averted: no Greek hero would be so foolish as to take on the collective might of every other Greek leader. The only thing which didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone, not even the sharp-witted Odysseus, was that Helen might be taken from her home by a man who hadn’t sworn the oath. One who wasn’t even a Greek.

Paris, or Alexandros (to give him the name some Greek writers prefer), was a Trojan prince. The son of Priam and Hecabe, the king and queen of Troy, he seduced or abducted Helen from her home in Sparta, again depending on the version of the myth you prefer. In the Iliad, Homer has Helen berate herself for eloping with Paris,14 saying she should have drowned in the sea before she had come with him to Troy. She wishes that Paris had been a better man, but it is herself she wishes dead. She blames them both for Troy’s predicament, but she names herself first: ‘because of me and Alexandros . . .’ And this version of the story – handsome prince meets beautiful queen, who abandons her husband to run away with him – provides the ammunition Hecabe needs for her vitriolic assessment of Helen’s character in The Trojan Women. Indeed, it has provided countless writers with the opportunity to blame Helen for the war: she is the face that launched a thousand ships, after all. Paris’ lovely face doesn’t warrant a mention, apparently.

But when Euripides has Helen arrive onstage, immediately after Hecabe has demanded that Menelaus kill her, he presents things rather differently. His Helen is nowhere near as accepting of either sole or major responsibility for the war. She is on trial for her life, albeit somewhat after the fact; the whole Greek army has already decided that she deserves to die: ‘They gave you to me to kill,’ Menelaus tells her.15 So Helen makes what we recognize as the speech for the defence that she didn’t receive, as her death sentence was decided in her absence. It is a dazzling piece of writing: a legal defence, given in verse, which makes the audience wonder if Euripides should have turned his hand to the law during the theatrical off-season.

Helen begins by saying that, because Menelaus regards her as an enemy, he doubtless won’t answer no matter how well she speaks.16 So she will reply to the charges she suspects her husband will level at her, and offer a few counter charges in return. She goes immediately on the offensive. Firstly, she says, Hecabe is to blame for the war because she’s the one who gave birth to Paris. Priam had a prophetic dream about his son when Paris was born, and still he wouldn’t kill him. As we’ve already seen with Oedipus, this may sound unreasonable to us, but the world of Bronze Age myth is full of children being killed by their parents for various reasons. Even in the fifth century BCE, when Euripides’ play was being performed, the exposure of unwanted children was commonplace. Although to modern ears, the argument ‘You ignored a prophecy about your child and didn’t kill him’ might not cut too much ice, it is reasonable to suspect that Euripides’ audience might have been more ambivalent. And indeed the question is concrete and mathematical for Hecabe: if she and Priam had killed Paris as a baby, their many other sons might not have died in the war Paris started. It’s not just a question of preferring the life of her child over the lives of the rest of the Trojan citizens. It’s about choosing one child’s life (lost now, anyway, at the end of the war) over many of her other children’s lives. In the scene Euripides placed just before this one, Hecabe had watched as her grandson, Astyanax (the son of her son Hector, and his wife, Andromache), was taken away to be killed by the Greeks because they didn’t want him to grow up to avenge his late father, the greatest of all the Trojan warriors. The ramifications of Hecabe’s choice are painfully real and recent, both for her and for the audience watching the play.