Euripides' Helen

• Why 2 Helen's?
• Euripides was not innovating.
• Stesichorus, a lyric poet who lived much earlier (ca. 630-55 BCE) had written a poem called "Palinode" which said that Helen had really been sent to Egypt while a fake Helen went to Troy.
• Stesichorus wrote poems titled Helen, Nostoi, Wooden Horse, Sack of Troy, Oresteia!!!
• Our major source for the Palinode, which contains the 2 Helens, is Plato: he says that Stesichorus wrote a new version of Helen because he thought he had slandered her in a previous one.
• As for a "double," remember Aeneias in book 5 of Iliad (5.451f.): the gods removed his body from the field and left the Greeks a simulacrum to fight over.
  
• As for Egypt, in Odyssey, Menelaus and Helen are blown off course to Egypt (Od. 3.276).
• Herodotus presents the story in yet another way: Helen never went to Troy, and the Greeks didn't believe the Trojans when they said they didn't have her, so they sacked Troy. Helen and Paris had gone to Egypt on the way back to Troy, but Proteus had heard about Paris' evil abduction and so took Helen away and sent Paris on to Troy!!
• And Euripides presents Helen very differently
  
• in Andromache (she's not a character, but she's blamed a lot and is not the virtuous person she is in Helen)
  
• in Euripides' Trojan Woman, she uses her magnetism to manipulate herself out of being killed by Menelaus)
• in Euripides' Orestes, she has to sneak into Argos because the people hate her...
• "aetiology" or "origin story"
  
• the Oresteia presents the aetiology of the court of the Areopagus
• Andromache presents the aetiology of the ruling house of the Molossians (historically accurate in Euripides' time)
• Helen presents the aetiology of the name of an island at the end: kind of minor detail.

• Produced in 412 BCE
• Andromache was 424/425BCE, 13 years earlier
• Electra was 420 BCE, 8 years earlier
• Some overall interpretive approaches of modern scholars:
  
• Fundamentally political anti-war play: subversive
  
• Fundamentally artistic and intellectual: posing moral questions and making art.
• Maybe Helen is just an escape from the present reality of Athens?
  
• EVIDENCE?
• bemoaning waste of war
• perhaps, but that has parallels even in Homer, as well as earlier tragedy
• also, Athens gave a full suit of armor and a front row seat to the sons of those who had fallen in the war!!
  
• a tragedy that really put that into question might well have been booed off the stage, don't you think?
  
• only by directly equating what happens in the play with what happened in Athens can we really arrive at such interpretations
• there is no such direct link: this is not like comedy
• these plays create their own worlds
• worlds which we CAN interpret as the same as our own, the same as Athenian reality of the time, or as timeless
• is the critique, if it is in a play, a critique of contemporary Athenian reality and morality and action OR of the world of Homer? the world of other tragedians? the world of Stesichorus? others?
• the play makes the Trojan War completely meaningless: it was fought over a phantom: or was it? the recognition scene provokes a reassessment of the past.
  
• if they had just gone to Egypt and found the real Helen, no need for war.
  
• together with Andromache and Eumenides and many others, the Helen is a "suppliant drama" where a main character takes refuge at an altar for safety:
• use of a feature of the ancient theater: the altar
  
• HELEN
• divine punishment of man by giving him woman?
• way for Zeus to lighten the load on the earth (Hesiod and Helen contain that claim)?
• just one individual who happens to be in that particular place?
• forced to do what she does?
• willingly going with Paris?
• she was worshipped as a goddess in at least three places: Sparta and Therapne and Attica
• Stesichorus makes her (with Theseus!!) the mother of Iphigenia!!