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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.
Themes
Appearance Versus Reality
One of the primary themes of Helen is that of appearance versus reality. This is one aspect of a larger cluster of themes that Euripides explores, which also includes a reflection on the nature of virtue and how it is perceived. The primary way in which the theme of appearance verses reality appears in the play is through the tension between the real Helen and the phantom Helen. Whereas most of the ancient Greek world thought of Helen as morally repugnant because of her presumed infidelity and because of all the bloodshed that followed from her actions, Euripides reminds us that not all is as it appears to be. The infidelity that was assumed of Helen was actually attributable to the actions of the phantom Helen, not the real one, and so the moral and social cost of the Trojan War could not be laid on Helen’s shoulders. As Helen herself says, “Although my name is vilified through Greece, my body here remains free from reproach” (74-75). The real Helen emerges from the play as a paragon of virtue, as far from the popular construal of her character as could be imagined. Teucer remarks on this point in the opening scenes, comparing Helen to the phantom version that he knows: “Your similarity to Helen is only skin-deep; inside you’re not a bit like her” (169-70). Euripides uses this disjunction between appearance and reality to remind his audience that the perception of another person’s virtue (or lack thereof) can easily fall prey to misinformation and misinterpretation.
Another place where the play deals with a disjunction between appearance and reality, once again in regard to virtue, comes with the introduction of Theonöe. When she appears on stage, her presence is a serious threat to Menelaos’s safety, and the main characters are not sure what she will do. Everything they know about the outward appearance of her role—that she is the king’s sister, an omniscient prophetess serving the royal house of Egypt—tends to make them think that she, knowing the truth about Menelaos’s presence and identity, would have every reason for betraying him to her brother (884-89). Appearances, however, are not reality, and Theonöe quickly emerges as a person of strong moral character (1072-75). Her virtue and piety are such that they override the outward appearance of her role as royal prophetess, and so she agrees to choose the virtuous deed of allowing Menelaos and Helen a chance to escape together, rather than serving her brother’s expectations.
Other occurrences of the appearance-versus-reality theme show up throughout the play. Menelaos’s tattered clothes are often pointed out as a symbol of this theme: He is the king of Sparta in reality but in appearance a ragged vagabond (445-47; 578-79). Similarly, the whole strategy of Helen’s ruse at the end of the play makes use of this theme. She frames it so that it will appear like a customary funeral rite to King Theoklymenos, when in reality the whole thing is an escape plan. Most importantly, the backstory of the play also plays on this theme. While the story of the Trojan War appears in Greek tradition to be a pivotal, epoch-making conflict marked with deeds of incredible courage, in reality it turns out to have been meaningless, a blood-soaked misunderstanding that need never have happened.
The Intelligence and Moral Character of Women
In Helen, as in many of his other plays, Euripides highlights the intelligence and moral character of women. While other playwrights, like Sophocles and Aristophanes, also occasionally drew sympathetic attention to the place of women in Greek society, Euripides was an outlier in the frequency and consistency with which he expressed these themes. Helen is a good example of Euripides’s tendencies in this regard, portraying women as not only having intelligence that compares favorably to men’s, but also being possessed of a more practical sensibility. The final scene of the play drives home this theme in clear terms: “Rejoice, therefore, in Helen’s noble mind” (1783). Even though the following line remarks that “there are few women like her” (1784), the totality of the play shows Euripides highlighting the positive aspects of all his female characters.
In Helen, Euripides reveals his title character to be intelligent, faithful, and compassionate. Rather than being vain and self-seeking (which is what most Greek audiences would expect from the character of Helen), she is marked by thoughtful reflection on not only her own circumstances, but also those of everyone who has been affected by her story. She even expresses sympathy for the victims of the Trojan War who had been enemies of her husband: “Countless mothers mourn a son,” she cries, “and countless Trojan girls, sisters of corpses, have shaved off their curls in grief by swirling Skamander’s side” (379-82).
Whereas most of Euripides’s literary contemporaries considered women to be emotional in a way that made them less subject to reason than men, Euripides portrays both Helen’s authentic emotionality and her intelligent wisdom. In fact, it is the men whose emotions tend to make them less rational in Helen. Menelaos’s masculine bravado leads him to propose hasty, unworkable plans, in contrast to Helen’s far more sensible suggestions (870-880; 1113-26), and Theoklymenos’s murderous rage stands in opposition to the Chorus Leader’s well-reasoned pleas for moral clarity and restraint (1718-39). Likewise, Theonöe emerges as a far more noble character than her brother because she is ruled by clear-eyed virtue, while he is driven by his passions. This distinction even appears in the play’s minor characters: Teucer is full of all kinds of rumored stories, which he believes without hesitation, and it falls to the women of the Chorus to be the voice of reason regarding those stories (318-23). In almost every instance, then, Euripides highlights the noble qualities of his female characters in contrast with the flaws and liabilities of his male ones.
The Folly of War (and Divination)
Another primary theme in Helen is Euripides’s exploration of the folly of war. He presents this theme in two major ways: first, through a repeated insistence on the worthlessness of divination (an attempt to seek knowledge of the future by consultation with the gods); and second, through his reworking of the background narrative of the Trojan War. While divination was a broad practice in the ancient world, appearing in many different contexts, it was especially important in the context of war. Before going on any military expedition, leaders would usually consult the gods and hope for a favorable omen. In the legends surrounding the launching of the Trojan War, one such incidence of divination (in which Agamemnon, Menelaos’s brother, sought to know how he could sail out to war and avoid the contrary winds keeping him in port) led to an oracle that commanded the human sacrifice of the princess Iphigenia. Euripides deals with that story in his play Iphigenia in Tauris, which may have been performed as part of a trilogy that included Helen in 412 BCE. In Helen, the practice of divination is not always tied to a critique of war (though it does appear so occasionally, as in the exclamation of Menelaos’s servant in lines 806-22), but both themes are held together by their common associations in Greek culture.
The rationale for Helen’s critique of divination appears to be a theological one. The play argues that the actions of the gods are capricious and changeable, and often the intended acts of one deity are in opposition to another god’s intentions. Theonöe, the only source of divination in Helen, admits that the situation before her is the result of two goddess’s contrary intentions (946-54). That being the case, divination is no sure source of insight about the future. An indication of the future may only turn out to be the guidance of one particular god, whose mind might end up changing later on, or whose acts might be opposed by a different god. Even when a single, overarching divine providence is assumed, Helen says that its designs are worked out with “curious wisdom” and are “hard to fathom” (768). Better, then, simply to pray and to use one’s common sense than to seek certain knowledge of a future that remains uncertain (822).
The folly of war is a strong undercurrent throughout Helen, both independently and when tied to its critique of divination. Euripides’s re-interpretation of the Trojan War, casting it as an ultimately meaningless conflict (763), would have driven this point home to his audience. Further, the parallels between the Trojan War and their own Peloponnesian War would have been hard to overlook. Euripides’s audience had just suffered through the devastating loss of their fleet in an expedition to Sicily, which in retrospect looked like nothing more than a major mistake. The audience would have found no comfort in Euripides’s portrayal of the meaninglessness of such ventures, but they almost certainly would have recognized their own condition in it.
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