The Greek Plays

"Aeschylus, according to legend, said that his own work was all slices from the banquet of Homer. Athenian tragedy can be seen as a genre at least partly invented out of a condensing and intensifying of motifs and plots from the Homeric poems. The tropes that Aristotle, in the Poetics , claims are essential components in tragic plots—recognition, reversal and suffering—are all there in Homer, as are the tragic motifs of conflict within families, of the brave, elite individual who is alienated from his or her community, of clashes between cultures, and of anger, grief, accidental and deliberate killing, and revenge. The Odyssey in particular, in the second half, sets up a sequence of one recognition-scene after another, within a grand revenge plot. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Helen by Euripides is in many ways the most Odysseyean of the tragedies we have, not least because it features Helen as the central character. In many ways, she’s quite similar to the Helen from Book 4 of the Odyssey . This Helen seems to be untainted in certain ways by the bad reputation and horrors of the war. In the case of the Odyssey , she’s untainted because she’s managed to get back with Menelaus, and the ten years of her time in Troy is all papered over—although it’s notable that Helen also makes it okay by providing useful drugs that can numb everybody to any kind of pain; and she and her brash husband tell very different stories about how Helen’s capacity for using clever schemes and disguises played out on the battlefield. In the Euripides version, by contrast, Helen has never been to Troy at all; the gods have substituted a phantom for the real woman, and whisked her off to Egypt, where she’s spent the past ten years waiting for Menelaus to return from war. “ Helen by Euripides is in many ways the most Odysseyean of the tragedies we have” It’s a complete re-write, which turns Helen into a new version of the Homeric Penelope: she’s the miserable chaste wife, whose beauty brings her harassment from annoyingly, scarily persistent local guy(s), and whose marriage is defined by grief. Euripides’ Helen, like Homer’s Penelope, is smart and good at thinking of clever schemes to outwit her suitor: Penelope uses the fake-piety of insisting she has to weave a shroud for not-yet-dead Laertes when he dies, and Helen uses a similar trick, insisting she has to bury her not-actually-dead husband out at sea (which enables them to get away). But it seems that the Odyssey itself is already trying to imagine, ‘What if we re-wrote Helen, and she’s not actually on the walls of Troy as she is in the Iliad , but having a lovely life in this rich palace? And what if the Helen of myth, or the Helen of the Iliad , were reinvented as Penelope?’ There’s a lot of common ground between those two much-courted, clever women, both weavers and dreamers, whose chastity is always being questioned. In Euripides, Helen is obsessed with plot and strategizing. In this way, the Helen of Euripides is also similar to Odysseus of the Odyssey . She’s constantly scheming, constantly devising ways that her disguises—including her face, her beauty—are not the same as her identity. The question ‘Are you what you look like?’, which is also central to the Odyssey , is at the forefront of this play, as is the question of what it means to have a long-term marriage, especially with someone you have huge differences from. At the heart of both works, too, is the theme of foreignness, about what it means to be in a space that isn’t your home space. Helen is set in Egypt, and Helen is being courted by the barbarian tyrant. Penelope of the Odyssey is a version of that phenomenon. She’s conscious of her face as something she has to constantly veil. It’s a source of power, but also a source of vulnerability. Once she shows her face to any man, it somehow lays her open to being stolen—being raped like Helen, or taken away or claimed in some way. Penelope insists her face is vulnerable to time, marked by the years of abandonment and grief. But when Athena gives her the divine make-over and makes her show herself to the suitors, looking irresistibly attractive, that isn’t necessarily better or more empowering for her, in contrasts to the make-overs of Odysseus; it increases the men’s desire to claim her. The Helen of Euripides isn’t marked by time; she’s as beautiful as ever. But her beauty creates its own kind of vulnerability, and it makes her, like Penelope, constantly a target for male judgment and male misinterpretation. “In the Odyssey , Odysseus and Helen have so much in common. They can both be nobody.” You’re right that there is something fascinating about the idea that there might be an emptiness either at the heart of the construct of desire, or the construct of the desirable woman specifically. How does appearance match reality—or does it? I was trying to make the connection not only with gender, but also with Odysseus and his many disguises. In the Odyssey , Odysseus and Helen have so much in common. They can both be nobody."