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EuripidesHelen
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Lines 404-931Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Lines 404-931 Summary
The second major section of the play consists of several sets of interactions between Menelaos, the portress, Helen, and Menelaos’s servant. This sequence resolves one of the major tensions of the play by reuniting Menelaos with his true wife rather than with the phantom Helen, but it also leads into the problem that constitutes the climax of the story: how they will foil King Theoklymenos’s plans to marry Helen and make their escape from Egypt.
Menelaos appears at the doors of the palace just after Helen and the Chorus have left, on their way to see Theonöe. The great king of Sparta, now a castaway, is clothed in rags after a shipwreck that cast him up on the shores of Egypt. His monologue introduces the audience to the tale of his troubles in the seven years since the Trojan War ended, as well as to the fact that some of his servants and sailors have survived, along with the phantom Helen he recaptured at Troy. These other companions he has left behind in a cave while he approaches the palace on his own. He is met there by the portress, an old woman, who deals with him roughly because of King Theoklymenos’s predisposition against Greeks, but she reveals enough information to convey to Menelaos that Helen is living there in Egypt. This news leaves Menelaos confused and crestfallen because if it is true, it means all his bloody labors at Troy were meaningless. He interprets this news as “new disasters following in the train of the old ones” (506-07).
His fear and bewilderment are compounded when Helen re-emerges from the palace with the Chorus. Helen is quickly convinced of his identity, having been told by Theonöe that her husband is alive and close at hand, but Menelaos is more suspicious. It is only after his servant approaches, bearing news that the phantom Helen has vanished into thin air, that he believes the true Helen’s story. Once they are reacquainted, Helen explains to Menelaos just how dire their situation is: King Theoklymenos intends to marry Helen, and he would kill Menelaos on the spot to ensure that his plan plays out. No easy escape is plausible because they have no ship and because Theonöe, the king’s sister, almost certainly already knows of Menelaos’s presence.
Lines 404-931 Analysis
The opening structure of this section mirrors the opening of the first section, thus presenting Helen and Menelaos in similar circumstances when they meet each other. Just as Helen is introduced with a monologue conveying her backstory, so Menelaos also has a similar monologue here (404-58). Where Teucer functioned to introduce new and troubling information to Helen, the portress fills a similar function for Menelaos. Nevertheless, while Euripides has set up Helen and Menelaos for their meeting in a similar fashion, they come into that meeting differently: Helen with optimism and expectancy, thanks to the encouraging information she has learned from Theonöe, but Menelaos with frustration and dread because of the ramifications of this meeting for his previous sufferings at Troy. Thus, in his two leading characters, Euripides continues to show the intertwining of comic and tragic threads. In this situation, Helen represents the comedy, the hope for a happy ending, while Menelaos is now the one wrestling with the emotional burdens of tragedy.
All three themes mentioned in the first section reappear here. There is again a disjuncture between appearance and reality, exemplified in the contrast between the phantom Helen and the real one. Menelaos’s aspect also fits this theme: in appearance a bedraggled castaway (with his ragged clothes often commented on), but in reality the king of Sparta and the conqueror of Troy. Menelaos himself comments on the cruel irony of this turnabout: “This, then, was the ultimate indignity for me—that I, a king myself, should have to beg food from my fellow-kings to stay alive” (532-35).
The second theme, which gives prominent place to women, can also be seen in this section. While the audience might expect Menelaos to be presented as the mythic hero they are accustomed to, in Euripides’s play he is always a step or two behind Helen, even while striking a sympathetic character. He comes across as proud and bluff, but not very bright. In one of the final interactions of this section (845-905), Helen and Menelaos exchange quick lines of dialogue as they explore their predicament, but it is Helen who does all the explaining and clarifying, and nearly every one of Menelaos’s lines is a question (and often a question implying a faulty idea that Helen must correct).
The third theme, of a clear-eyed reckoning of the costs of war, is also present. It can be seen, for example, in Menelaos’s hesitancy to accept his wife’s story. Even though the true Helen stands before him, the hope of all his labors for more than a decade, he cannot at first even countenance the idea because it strips the sufferings of his war of all their meaning: “The pain I felt at Troy outweighs your talk” (616). The corollary theme, which warns against divination and the presumption that people can know divine plans for the future, appears more strongly in this section than before, particularly as Menelaos’s servant draws conclusions from the knowledge that the siege of Troy (which included the presence and consultation of oracles) was nothing more than the chasing of a mirage. “I do now see,” he says, “how full of lies, how rotten the whole business of prophecy is. There never was any sense in watching sacrificial flames” (806-09).
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By Euripides
