41 pages • 1 hour read
EuripidesHelen
Fiction | Play | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Socio-Historical Context
Some literary critics have called Helen an anti-war play, but it might be more accurate just to say that Euripides insists upon acknowledging the heartbreaking realities of war, whether or not the war itself is advisable. Within the context of this play, it does appear that he considered the Trojan War an exercise in meaningless death, and he may have been nudging his audience toward viewing their own recent military misadventure in the same tragic light. Euripides’s critical portrayal of the meaninglessness of war would likely have struck his Athenian audience with particular force, as the Athenians had just received word of the devastation of their fleet in 413 BCE, as their ill-considered military venture against Sicily—an extension of the Peloponnesian War—ended in a shocking failure. Just as the devastating cost of the Trojan War was a lamentable, preventable mistake, so also their failed invasion of Sicily arguably need never have been launched.
Cultural Context
The backstory of Helen of Troy was well known and infamous when Euripides wrote his play. It was presumed across the Greek world that she was the instigating cause of the Trojan War. Helen was famous for her beauty, and Aphrodite had offered her as a prize to Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy. So, Paris went and claimed Helen for himself, abducting her (willingly, it was believed) away from her husband Menelaos, the king of Sparta. Menelaos then raised an army from mainland Greece and sailed across the Aegean Sea to besiege Troy in a bloody war that raged for a decade and saw the deaths of many famed heroes from both sides. When the Greeks finally defeated the Trojans, Menelaos reclaimed his wife, Helen, and sailed away with her, but their return voyage home was disrupted by storms and shipwrecks.
In Euripides’s play, this famous storyline is turned on its head in the opening monologue. This take on the story of the Trojan War is not Euripides’s invention, as it represents an existing counter-narrative first seen in the works of the Sicilian poet Stesichorus, who also refers to a phantom copy of Helen as the one who went to Troy. It was, however, not the primary accepted narrative, and it was not even the version favored by Euripides in his earlier plays, so it no doubt came as something of a surprise to the audience.
Authorial Context
Euripides is one of the three canonical Greek tragedians—the others being his older fifth-century contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles—but he is the most controversial of the three. His plays are marked by an embrace of controversial issues in his society, which won him a great deal of both respect and suspicion. His modern reception has also been mixed, particularly as regards Helen: Due to Helen’s replication of the overarching plot structure of another of his plays, Iphigenia at Tauris, some scholars have written it off as a derivative work. Helen fits into Euripides’s controversial oeuvre in several respects: its subversion of the story of the Trojan War, its critique of warfare, and its positive portrayal of the intellectual and moral character of women—each of which was provocative in Euripides’s day.
Related Titles
By Euripides
