Excerpt

THE TROJAN WAR

The Trojan War is obscured in the mists of history. Nobody knows how big it really was, how long it lasted, or whether a thousand ships even existed at the time. There does seem to have been some war in which power shifted from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) to the Mediteranean. Anatolia was one of the world's first centers of agriculture and civilization, back when the people of Greece were barely out of the trees and caves. And even as the early Greeks began to advance, Ilium, what we call Troy, controlled the narrow passage to the northern sea and its trade ports. They had some kind of dominance, whether colonialism or just toll-collecting, it's even possible they may have demanded tribute in the form of oil, wine and maidens. This could explain the war's classic justification: the abduction of a woman called “demolition,” or as her name was pronounced in Greek: “Helen.” Regardless of what precise spark started the flame, it's clear that the tribal warlords of the Mediteranean agreed to some unified action, to level the city, and succeeded. But it was probably more like a pirate raid than an epic battle. And ten years, a thousand boats, these numbers are just too round to be credible as fact, they sound more like mythical proportions.

The old story goes that the Olympian gods had gathered for a wedding, but neglected to invite Eris the goddess of chaos. So she tossed an apple into the middle of the reception with an inscription: “For the fairest of all.” She may as well have thrown a grenade, a ballroom blitz broke out among the goddesses Hera (matrimony), Athena (wisdom) and Aphrodite (attraction). When they demanded that Zeus judge a pageant he declined, an uncharacteristic display of wisdom, and suggested instead that they take this to prince Paris of Troy. Being competitive and spiteful, each goddess offered a bribe: Hera promised him rule of all the known world, Athena offered him wisdom and skill, Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman on earth. Paris chose Aphrodite and went to claim his prize, but there was a catch: Helen was already married. Reports differ on whether she sailed off with Paris by choice or force, but so began the Trojan War.

Helen's husband, the Spartan king Menelaus, called his brother Agamemnon king of Argos and together they rallied the Greeks to attack the famous fortified city. The jilted Athena let Troy suffer ten years of siege before revealing a stratagem to Odysseus, to build a giant wooden gift-horse and fill it with soldiers to burst out once the statue was within the city walls.

The classic report of the Trojan War is a pair of novels, what we today would call “historical fiction,” assembled four hundred years after the smoke had cleared, and attributed to someone named Homer. Actually, the Iliad and Odyssey are two installments of an eight-part series, most of which is lost. We have scattered quotes and references, but we're missing six books. For example, neither of the surviving Homeric epics contains the story of the Trojan Horse, that was in one of the other volumes.

Homer explains the war as a giant lynch-mob action: a woman has been abducted, possibly raped, by a foreigner and a posse rides out for revenge. This vendetta becomes a giant massacre, the city walls are leveled, all Trojan men are slaughtered and the women are dragged off in chains. The classic motivation for the war is pride: the wounded pride of a husband, nationalist pride, and the glorious pride of fallen heroes like Achilles and Hector.

The Trojan War's aftermath is a tangled blood-feud, a knot of violent vendettas and vigilante justice. Playwrights and filmmakers generally present this period looking like the Athens of a thousand years later, but the stories would fit better in a Spaghetti Western film. And yet there's also this paranormal element – Cassandra's helpless prophecies, Achilles' bloodthirsty ghost, the Furies that haunt Orestes.

And then there are the gods with their own grudges – for petty slights they attack or strand or annihilate mortals, and they snipe at each other by breaking human beings like action-figures. Vain goddesses punish Paris and all of Troy, then they turn on the winners, sinking the victorious fleet and dragging Odysseus through a decade of travail. They send mixed messages and drive Orestes insane.

The Iliad and Odyssey had already been ancient classics for centuries when the dramatists began adapting chapters for the stage, sometimes reinterpreting or entirely re-imagining famous scenes in new ways that would have shocked historians in the audience.

Of the thirty three Greek Dramas that survive, sixteen deal with the Trojan War and its aftermath. Clearly this was a milestone event in terms of “Greek” identity, not only as a source of pan-Hellenic pride, but more importantly as a logic problem: it was a crime of passion, opposite of the rational justice Athens was striving to develop. In modern investigative terms, the Trojan War was a “cold case” that had to be re-tried using new forensic methods. Crimes had to be re-enacted, like a documentary dramatization, killers and victims needed to be cross-examined, witnesses had to testify, in some cases gods were retained as lawyers. All of this almost a thousand years after Troy had been reduced to ruins. Episodes of this epic courtroom drama were massive hits on the Athenian stage.

Putting the Trojan War on trial was not just a theoretical/intellectual exercise. It was vitally important in the playwrights' lifetimes. Aeschylus wrote shortly after the allied victory over invading Persians, a brief moment in which the usually hostile Athens and Sparta had cooperated to win a great victory. Aeschylus dug back into their last great allied effort, the Trojan War, and sifted through its wreckage, basically claiming the glory of victory for Athenian rationality and assigning the messy parts to Spartan blood-lust. Then in the prime years of Sophocles and Euripides, the Trojan War's victors Athens and Sparta were locked in a Cold War that rapidly heated, becoming the Peloponnesian War which threatened to tear all of Greece to pieces. The Spartans would crush Athens a year after Sophocles and Euripides died, but while they lived it was vital to examine these ancient ties, and wonder if these two nations could ever re-establish some form of Pan-Hellenic unity, or at least coexist.

My book Welcome to Tragedy contains a chapter on each of the 33 surviving scripts by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, plus a three comedies by Aristophanes. This is a sample chapter:

HELEN

Euripides, 412BCE

Title : Helen needs no introduction. But this one by Robert Meagher is really good: “Among the myths and legends of Greece, there is no story more lovely and luring than that of Helen. From kings, warriors, and bards alike she summoned the ultimate effort. Her surpassing beauty not only launched the Greek fleet of a thousand ships to Troy but also bemused legions of ancient poets to sing her praise and her shame: praise for her loveliness and shame for her adultery. In all Greece, and in all ancient poetry, there was no woman so adored and so hated as Helen. She was at once goddess and whore, prize and scapegoat, fantasy and flesh.”

The title of this play is a bit misleading in its simplicity. We may expect a story about Helen in Troy. But Euripides departs from Homer's straightforward explanation of the Trojan War (a prince of Troy kidnapped a Spartan queen – as one scholar put it, “Helen made love and the Greeks made war.”) and builds a premise from two fairly random mythic fragments: one, that Paris was tricked by the gods into abducting a phantom illusion of Helen, and two, that the real Helen somehow wound up in Egypt.

Helen of Mass Destruction..?

The play opens with Helen – the Helen, Helen-of-Sparta who was kidnapped and famously became Helen-of-Troy – but in this play she is Helen of Egypt. The premise is that the angry goddess Hera pulled a bait-and-switch on the Trojan prince Paris, he kidnapped a phantom copy while the real Helen was magically whisked off to Egypt and adopted by the king Proteus. She's been there seventeen years, the full decade of the Trojan war and another seven years while her husband tried to get home. Now the Egyptian king, her guardian, has died and his son Theoclymenus has resolved to marry the Greek demigoddess. Later we find out that Helen's husband Menelaus, who's been sailing seven years with the phantom Helen, has washed up on the Egyptian shore.

Euripides' Helen toys with the boundary between life and death. The whole drama takes place in a tomb – like a sailor clinging to the mast in a storm, Helen clings to the death monument of the Egyptian king who adopted her, seeking sanctuary. If she leaves this spot, she can be abducted into marriage, and so needs a dead man's protection. Meanwhile, her husband Menelaus has hidden the phantom Helen in another cave. Both Helens are in the underworld.

“All my luck has turned to grief and for all purposes I am dead, yet live in fact,” Helen says – for seventeen years she has been in Egypt, dead-to-the-world, like a ghost, helpless to stop the war that was fought over her, helpless to stop the phantom-Helen from trashing her reputation: “I wish that like a picture I had been rubbed out and done again, made plain, without this loveliness...I have done nothing wrong and yet my reputation is bad, and worse than a true evil is it to bear the burden of faults that are not yours...crushed by scandal... Such is the depth of my unhappiness, that while for other women beauty means their happiness it is my very beauty that has ruined me.”

Helen learns from a sailor that her relatives have perished – her mother hanged herself from the shame of having raised a hussy, her two brothers either committed suicide or got pulled into the sky and turned into stars, and her husband Menelaus is missing, presumed dead. Not to mention the whole bloodbath of the Trojan War, which has turned her name into a curse. In this crummy situation, all she can do is plan a suicide: “I will bind my throat fast in the hanging noose of death, or with the deadly stroke that cuts the throat open and bleeding, drive the iron with my own hand hard into my body, a sacrifice for the trinity of goddesses.”

Menelaus has also been symbolically dead, lost at sea for seven years (his relatives believe he drowned), and washing up on the shores of Egypt he finds himself in a sort of purgatory – he's wrapped in rags, he's not a celebrity, and his threats of force are belittled and dismissed by an old lady: “You may have been a great man at home. You are not one here... There are many men who have bad luck, not only you.” All the assistance he can get is the warning that as an anonymous Greek he'll be killed if he's caught in Egypt. Furthermore he learns during the play that the wife he spent ten years fighting to rescue and seven years sailing with was just a ghost: “We were swindled by the gods. We had our hands upon an idol of the clouds.” Then the ghost-Helen will curse everyone and evaporate.

Helen and Menelaus finally get back together again, but they've got no way out of Egypt. So their happy reunion turns to a suicide pact. Fortunately Helen is resourceful, and devises an elaborate scam – not only to escape, but to escape in style. First they must convince an Egyptian prophetess to cover their exit with a lie, and here the play has its comic climax: Menelaus refuses to bow down and beg in front of a woman, so orders the oracle to eavesdrop as he asks a favor from her dead father's monument, and then from the lord of the underworld: “Hades of the downworld, I invoke your aid as well. You have taken many dead men, fallen before my sword, because of this woman. You are paid your price in full. Now bring these bodies to life again and yield them back, or force this [prophetess to] give me back the bride of my love.” The oracle is swayed by Helen's persuasion, despite Menelaus' misogyny, and agrees to keep their secret.

The plan is for Helen to accept the Egyptian king's marriage proposal, on the condition that he first allow her to perform a funeral at sea, mourning her dead husband. She cooks up a fake ritual for lost sailors, for which she'll need a ship and a heaping bounty of grave-goods and sacrificial offerings (wealth and food). Then, having replaced the oarsmen with Menelaus' own crew they row like hell for Sparta. Add some kazoo music, and it could be one of those old high-speed slapstick chase-scenes. Heightening the comedy, Menelaus the great warrior doesn't get to battle his way out of Egypt, rescuing a damsel in distress – he must get smuggled off by a crafty woman: Helen, pretending to be the temptress everyone thinks she is.)

It's a swirl of wedding and funeral imagery – Helen's funeral for Menelaus is to be followed by her wedding to the Egyptian king, but the funeral actually becomes a re-marriage to Menelaus. Euripides wrote numerous plays about someone who was dead or presumed dead returning to life, and in Helen he works a triple resurrection – Helen has been trapped in Egypt like Persephone in the underworld, and escapes. Her reputation which has been dragged through the mud can be rehabilitated. And as the icing on the cake, the marriage of Helen and Menelaus, broken for seventeen years, is finally restored.

Miscellaneous : Helen is one of the least famous surviving Greek dramas, which is a shame because it adds an important dimension to any study of the genre – proof that “Greek Drama” was not nearly as formulaic as Aristotle and our professors might say. But we also possess solid evidence that the play was popular in its own time, because it was parodied three years later in Aristophanes' Thesmophoria, in which the comic playwright recalled numerous direct quotations. Whether this means Euripides' play was famous or infamous we don't know – presumably like Helen herself it received a mix of positive and negative attention.

(These quotes from the play are from the Richmond Lattimore's 1969 translation. And this contains two short quotes from Robert Meagher's 1986 introduction to Eurpides' Helen.)

CONTENT

PART I: ANCIENT HISTORY

Prometheus Bound Aeschylus, Date Unknown

The Suppliants Aeschylus, C 463 BCE

Ion Euripides, C412 BCE

Medea Euripides, 431 BCE

The Bacchae Euripides, 405 BCE

Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles, 427 BCE

Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles, 401 BCE

Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus, 467 BCE

Antigone Sophocles, C442 BCE

Phoenician Women Euripides, 408 BCE

The Suppliants Euripides 423 BCE

Hippolytus Euripides, 428 BCE

Alcestis Euripides, 438 BCE

Heracles Euripides, C418 BCE

Trachinian Women Sophocles, Date Unknown

The Children of Heracles Euripides, C430 BCE

The Persians Aeschylus, 472 BCE

PART II: THE TROJAN WAR

Introduction: The Trojan War

Iphigenia at Aulis Euripides, 405 BCE

Rhesus Euripides, Date Unknown

Ajax Sophocles, C442 BCE

Philoctetes Sophocles, 409 BCE

Trojan Women Euripides, 415 BCE

Hecuba Euripides, 424 BCE

Oresteia I: Agamemnon Aeschylus, 458 BCE

Oresteia II: The Libation Bearers Aeschylus, 458 BCE

Electra Sophocles, Year Unknown

Electra Euripides, C415 BCE

Orestes Euripides, 408 BCE

Oresteia III: The Eumenides Aeschylus, 458 BCE

Iphigenia in Tauris Euripides, C412 BCE

Helen Euripides, 412 BCE

Andromache Euripides, C427 BCE

The Cyclops Euripides, Date Unknown

Conclusion

...AND THREE COMEDIES

Lysistrata Aristophanes, 411 BCE

Women at Thesmophoria Aristophanes, 411 BCE

The Frogs Aristophanes, 405 BCE

Bibliography and Notes

Character Index