Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War
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What should readers make of Cassandra’s ingenious rereading of the Achaeans’ glorious destruction of Troy? At one level, it is possible to read her speech in conjunction with the prologue of the drama, which hints at the Achaeans’ calamitous homecoming, as well as the audience’s (intra- and extra-textual) knowledge of Agamemnon’s future murder at the hands of his wife and her lover. From this vantage point, Cassandra can be viewed in heroic terms, as the only Trojan able to defeat Agamemnon and avenge Troy.29 At another level, we might prefer the more ominous view that Cassandra is engaging in the sophistic arts, deploying sophisticated rhetoric in order to argue her case. While she initially destabilizes the myth of glorious warfare, she later resurrects the very terms that she has just laid bare (e.g. κλέος, δόξας). According to this reading, ‘these words are corpses, animated only by a false, posthumous galvanism’.30 While there is evidently an oratorical force in Cassandra’s rhetoric, it does not necessarily follow that her statements should be deemed false (indeed, it is worth remembering Cassandra’s overarching belief that the wise should oppose warfare).31 Rather, this speech, along with Cassandra’s subsequent prophetic statements on Hecuba’s death at Troy (428–30), Odysseus’ travails following his departure from Troy (431–45),32 as well as her own bitter death, in which her unburied body will become kibble for wild beasts (448–50), is better read as a response to the portrayal of conflict in the Homeric poems, conditioned by the historical specifics of Euripides’ own day.33
Athens in 415 BCE was a city deeply concerned about the role of rhetoric in public discourse. Large numbers of sophists were active in the city, offering training in the rhetorical arts – and by extension – the political arts.34 This led to concern about the power of oratory, and the potential for the manipulation of arguments by skilled speakers. In the years immediately preceding the production of the Troades, Aristophanes had written and revised his Clouds, a comedy that poked fun at philosophers and sophists.35 The Clouds depicted a world where the power of rhetoric could make an unjust argument preferable to a just one, and a weaker argument appear stronger. Cassandra’s speech assumes some ambiguous qualities in this immediate historical context. Her appropriation of Homeric and heroic language is certainly sophistic; but are we meant to see her argument and her value judgement as essentially right or essentially wrong? Is this a case of the weaker argument seeming stronger because it is couched in suitably Iliadic language and because we already know the machinations of the gods? Or is this an example of the stronger argument seeming weak and ridiculous, because it is put into the mouth of a captive woman whose individual fate was never to be believed?
Novel songs
Cassandra’s radical speeches are not the only example in which the Troades seeks to challenge the Homeric texts by providing a novel perspective on the events at Troy. At the outset of the first choral stasimon (511–67), the Chorus sing:
ἀμφί μοι Ἴλιον, ὦ
Μοῦσα, καινῶν36 ὕμνων
ᾆσον σὺν δακρύοις ᾠδὰν ἐπικήδειον·
νῦν γὰρ μέλος ἐς Τροίαν ἰαχήσω,
τετραβάμονος ὡς ὑπὁ ἀπήνας
Ἀργείων ὀλόμαν τάλαινα δοριάλωτος,
ὅτὁ ἔλιπον ἵππον οὐράνια
βρέμοντα χρυσεοφάλαρον ἔνο-
πλον ἐν πύλαις Ἀχαιοί·
About Ilium, O Muse,
Sing for me a new-made hymn
of mourning with tears.
For now I will sing a song of Troy,
how that four-wheeled Argive contraption
wrought my destruction and unfortunate enslavement,
when the horse, reaching high heaven
with its clatter, decked with gold cheekpieces and
arms, was left at the gates by the Achaeans.
Euripides, Troades 512–21
What emerges from this hymn – aided by the Muses – is not a celebration of the glory attained by those warriors that had performed best on the battlefield, or even those like Odysseus who are most crafty in speech; rather, the Chorus orient the audience’s perspective towards the city of Troy itself, specifically at the fateful moment when the Trojans unwittingly accepted the Greeks’ baleful equine artifice. (In this way, the Troades speaks intertextually to Aeschylus’ Persae, which also emphasizes the immediate and disastrous impact of Persian loss at Salamis and Pysttaleia on Persian society.) In the song that follows, the Chorus recount in bleak terms their joyful acceptance of the Argives’ gift (‘Argive’ is used in the Troades, as in the Iliad, interchangeably with ‘Achaean’); for instance, the Chorus refer to the songs and dances they performed in honour of Artemis (552–55).37 They continue by relating a ‘murderous shout’ (φοινία … βοὰ, 555–56) that possessed the city, which left the children of Troy in a state of terror, as the Greek men emerged from the Trojan horse (‘the work of maiden Pallas’, κόρας ἔργα Παλλάδος, 561; cf. 46–47, 72) and committed unspeakable atrocities against the Trojans at their altars and in their homes.
Many scholars have rightly emphasized the differences between this tragic hymn and epic poetry. For instance, Kevin Lee has argued that in performing this new tragic lament for Troy, the Chorus appeal to and refresh epic themes by delivering a new kind of epic account, one that reifies not glorious warfare, but the women’s experience of Troy’s destruction.38 Eirene Visvardi has written similarly of the Chorus’ performance of a tragic epic that eschews celebrating ‘the glorious deeds of men’ (κλέα ἀνδρῶν, Il 9.189).39 More recently, Isabelle Torrance has fruitfully explored the passage’s intertextual relationship with Odyssey 8, specifically when the bard Demodocus sings a hymnos concerning the wooden horse (8.426–534). As Torrance notes, this is the only occasion in the Homeric poems that we encounter this particular term for a song, and it can hardly be coincidental that the Troades’ Chorus deploy this same term for their ode,40 which also concerns the Achaeans’ equine ‘gift’. The connections between the two texts are further enriched when we consider that just as the Chorus’ ode is one sustained with tears (513), Demodocus’ song reduces Odysseus to tears – tears that become the subject of a famous, extended simile on a female victim’s tears (Od. 8.523–32).41 In this sense, this scene is indeed, as Davidson suggests, ‘thoroughly Homeric’,42 by capitalizing on a set of motifs already operative in the Iliad.
What this ode does, therefore, is to offer an alternative Iliad, from the perspective of Trojans rather than Achaeans.43 Euripides presents here a song that could have been part of the wider set of Trojan War traditions, acknowledging the breadth of this tradition. He is also writing himself into the role of the Homeric poet – as the composer of an alternative Iliad. This sets up a kind of meta-competition, pitting Euripides against Homer as the poet of Troy and its commemoration. We already saw in Chapter 1,how the Iliad sought to position itself within a wider poetic tradition – here, we can see Euripides’ Iliadic attempt to position his own play within the wider Trojan War tradition. Doing this, however, seems to have meant placing himself in relation to – or perhaps more accurately in the position of – Homer. By this time, to engage with the Trojan War tradition was to engage with the Iliad.
Agonal conflict
One of the most crucial scenes in the Troades comes near the climax of the play, involving a dramatic ἀγών (a formal verbal contest) between Hecuba and Helen.44 This debate scene has generated considerable scholarly discussion, not least because of the extraordinarily sophistic defence offered by Helen, as well as the unsatisfying outcome of the debate, which leaves the scene’s (arguably) shallowest characters (Helen and Menelaus) as the eventual victors.45 The scene opens with a jarringly cheerful Menelaus (‘O how bright the radiant light of the sun is’, 860), who defends his decision to attack Troy, not in order to reclaim Helen but rather to avenge Paris (864–66).
Menelaus then insists that he can no longer take pleasure in enunciating his wife’s name (869–70)46 and proclaims that he has come to transport her back to Greece, where she will be murdered in order to satisfy those whose loved ones died in Troy (876–79). Hecuba instantaneously responds in hopeful expectation, praying to ‘Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of mortals’ (Ζεύς, εἴτ᾽ ἀνάγκη φύσεος εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν, 886) to deliver justice by ensuring the death of Helen.47 Hecuba continues by advising Menelaus to avoid Helen’s gaze, ‘for she captures the eyes of men, destroys cities, and burns homes’ (αἱρεῖ γὰρ ἀνδρῶν ὄμματ᾽, ἐξαιρεῖ πόλεις, | πίμπρησιν οἴκους, 892–93), a trio of evils that operates as a modified form of Aeschylus’ famous pun on Helen’s name: ‘destroyer of ships, destroyer of men, destroyer of cities’ (ἑλένας, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέ- | πτολις, Aesch. Ag. 689–90; cf. p.64 above).
It is at this moment of profound denigration of Helen that she finally enters the tragic stage – perhaps for the first time48 – dressed in royal splendour (1022–28; cf. 1107–09), though fearful for her life. This Helen instantly proves a stark visual contrast with the other Trojan women, who are dressed in rags with heads shaven. She asks to defend herself, in order to show that her death would be unjust (903–04); although Menelaus initially rejects her pleas, Hecuba (somewhat improbably) incites him to permit Helen’s discourse, since ‘[Helen’s] entire speech will kill her’ (ὁ πἕς λόγος | κτενεῖ νιν, 909–10). The audience, however, might already perceive a bleak irony in these lines, since Hecuba has just referred to Helen’s bewitching charms.49 Even before the contest begins properly, the playwright intimates that Helen will emerge unscathed, and that woe will continue to pile on woe for Hecuba.
Unusually for a debate, Helen begins with her defence speech, which, as other have acknowledged, is highly sophistic in nature, evoking in particular Gorgias’ famous Encomium of Helen (for which see p.117 below).50 Unlike the Helen of the Iliad, who, as we saw in Chapter 1, explicitly blames herself for Troy’s troubles (e.g. Il. 3.344–48; 6.356), the Troades’ Helen develops a multipronged speech that implicates various individuals, but not herself. To blame are: Hecuba, for rearing Paris, ‘the beginning of evils’ (ἀρχὰς … τῶν κακῶν,51 919); the old man (either the retainer of Paris or Priam) who failed to expose the baby Paris, a story that had already been covered in the first drama of this trilogy, the Alexander (920–22); Paris, who is characterized as ‘resembling a firebrand’ (δαλοῦ πικρὸν μίμημ᾽, 922; see p.65 above for a later appearance of this image); Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, who instigated the Judgement of Paris; Menelaus, who she outrageously casts as ‘most evil’ (κάκιστε, 943),52 for sojourning to Crete while Paris was at Sparta (943–44); Aphrodite, who enslaves even Zeus (949–50); the Trojans, for denying Helen flight from the battlements of Troy; and, finally, her new husband, Deiphobus,53 who kept her by force, against the wishes of the Trojans.54 In a spin on Cassandra’s speech earlier in the play, Helen suggests that by eloping with Paris, she helped Hellas (Greece) avoid human bondage;55 the Hellenes’ victory, however, she casts as her ruin, since she is reproached for the very thing that should have secured a ‘crown on her head’ (στέφανον ἐπὶ κάρᾳ, 937).56
At first sight, Euripides’ unapologetic Helen appears to be a far cry from the Helen of the Iliad, who repeatedly blames herself for the events that have ensued. That being said, Euripides’ account does not entirely depart from the Homeric poem; in some senses, his account develops ideas already implicit in the Iliad.57 First, true to the traditional character of Helen’s remarks concerning Aphrodite’s power in the Troades, when the Iliad’s Helen attempts to snub Aphrodite’s command for her to enter Alexander’s chamber, the goddess issues such a threat that Helen swiftly heeds her words, fearful and in silence (ll. 3.389–410). Secondly, while the Iliad’s Helen is more forthcoming about her own culpability, she too boldly casts aspersions on Paris, charging him as being inferior to Menelaus in valour and questioning his soundness of mind (ll. 3.428–36; 6.349–53), as well as implicating him in the terrible fate of the Trojans (ll. 6.356; 24673–74). Finally, in her lament for slaughtered Hector at the close of the Iliad, Helen remarks explicitly on her loneliness at Troy, since all shudder at the sight of her (ll. 24.674–75), which the Troades confirms throughout with the various invectives that are delivered against her (e.g. Andromache’s brutal attack at 766–73). Clearly, then, Euripides’ fifth-century Helen is not a complete reimagining of her Iliadic counterpart; she constitutes a more extreme form of the Iliad’s already-conflicted Helen, attempting to persuade Menelaus of her own innocence (cf. Il. 6.360, where Hector rebuffs her request to sit down, stating that ‘you will not persuade me’).58
In Hecuba’s response to Helen, the fallen queen delivers an extended, multilayered attack that thoroughly refutes Helen’s apologia. Hecuba denies the Judgement of Paris ever took place (869–82; contra 23–24); she proposes that Helen transformed her lust for beautiful Paris into an Aphrodite-led infatuation (987–88); she denigrates Helen for craving Troy’s luxuries (993–97); she denies that Helen was led to Troy by force (998–1001); and she reproaches her for failing either to flee Troy or to commit suicide (1010–19). The viciousness of Hecuba’s reprimand comes to full force at the close of the speech, where she urges Menelaus to kill Helen, so that she functions as a negative paradigm for all adulterous women (1029–32). One of the most remarkable features of Hecuba’s speech is its consciously Hellenic texture:59 she twice refers to the Trojans as barbarians (973, 1021), calling to mind contemporary Athenian political discourses on the foreigner;60 she characterizes Troy as a seat of oriental luxury, in contrast to modest Argos (Helen’s former home); and she suggests that Menelaus will win a crown for Hellas by killing Helen (1030–31). In Hecuba’s use of rational argumentation and familiar panhellenic ideology, Euripides thus destabilizes the distinctions between self and other, and, remarkably enough, enables the audience to empathize with a vanquished, foreign woman.
As much as Menelaus’ concluding verdict on Helen’s guilt (1036–41) and the force of Hecuba’s indignant attack has satisfied some commentators that she is the ἀγών’s clear victor,61 Euripides in fact presents a debate that is more concerned with exploring the multiple causes of the Trojan War than delimiting a conclusive answer on the architect of the war. Like the Iliad, the debate leaves the audience unclear as to who is ultimately responsible for what has occurred (see further Chapter 2), not least because of the way that the complex mixture of divine and mortal causations (particularly in Helen’s speech) become impossible to disentangle.62
Helen is a powerful figure of blame in this episode, as she is elsewhere in the Troades (e.g. 134–37, 373, 498–99, 780–81). And yet, as if to underline the inconclusiveness of the contest, it is plainly clear in the lines which follow that Euripides encourages his audience to appeal to their knowledge of Odyssey 4, in which the Spartan queen is back at home with Menelaus.63 For Menelaus initially claims that she will be stoned to death straightaway, but after Helen supplicates the king, he commands his servants to take her to the ships, from where she will be conveyed back to Greece (1046–48). Hecuba’s faith in retribution has now clearly dwindled, and the playwright underscores this point when Menelaus, advised by Hecuba not to embark on the same ship as Helen, responds bemusedly ‘is she heavier than she was previously?’ (μεῖζον βρῖθος ἢ πάροιθ᾽ ἔχει; 1050).64 Indeed, the theme of Hecuba’s hopes being dashed is a motif repeated throughout the play, such as when Andromache informs her of Polyxena’s death, quashing her earlier hopes that she may still be alive (626–27, 260–71), or when Talthybius relates that Astyanax is to be killed, thus thwarting Hecuba’s hopes that her grandson might refound the city of Troy (719, 701–05). The failure of the ἀγών is poignant, not only in the pathos it generates for Hecuba but also in its comme
nt on contemporary Athens. Debate and discussion have been proved futile, and logical argument has been rendered valueless. In the ἀγών, the themes touched on in Cassandra’ speech are taken to their logical conclusion, with chilling effect. Indeed, the tragic ἀγών of the Troades eventually reaches the same conclusion as Aristophanes’ comic ἀγών of the logoi in the Clouds, revised for publication only a few years before the first performance of the Troades.65 In both cases, the Unjust Argument (᾽Ἀδικος Λόγος) won out over the Just Argument (Δίκαιος Λόγος).
Conflicts old and new
Like other texts that we encounter in this volume, the Troades is no straightforward adaptation of the Iliad; not only does much of the storyline of the drama differ from that of the Homeric poem, but Euripides’ tragedy adopts a reading of the events at Troy that bespeaks a wide intertextual framework.66 As the discussion has illustrated, this is a drama that is fundamentally concerned with the utterly bleak effects of a city’s annihilation, profoundly depressing in its unrelenting depiction of the Trojans’ misery, in contrast to other Euripidean Trojan texts such as Hecuba, in which the former queen manages to exact vengeance on Polymestor for the murder of her son Polydorus.67 The fall of a city would have an especially redolent topic at this time, given recent atrocities conducted by the Spartans against Plataea (Thuc. 3.68), Hysiae (Thuc. 5.83), and Iasos (Diod. 13.104.7), as well as by the Athenians against Scione (Thuc. 5.32) and Melos (Thuc. 5.116).68
The last of these in particular would have been at the forefront of the audience’s mind when it was first performed in 415 BCE. Just one year before, the ἀνδραποδισμός of the Melians (the slaughter of adult male citizens and enslavement of women and children) had been ordered after a debate between the Melians and the Athenians – a kind of political ἀγών where the stakes were life and death for an entire community. The so-called ‘Melian Debate’ (Thucydides 5.84–116) was evidently written some time after the Troades, but it too depicts debate, rhetoric, and oratory as an arena of war. Indeed, in the very same year as the Troades was produced, Thucydides sets another of his dramatic set-piece political debates – the debates surrounding the decision to launch the Sicilian Expedition (Thuc 6.8–26). Taken together with Aristophanes’ Clouds and Thucydides’ portrayal of contemporary political discourse, Euripides’ Troades suggests a deep anxiety in Athens over debate, rhetoric, and the power of words.