Helen

With one major source of tension already resolved (the reunification of Helen and Menelaos), the play quickly moves to the immediate problem: how to evade King Theoklymenos’s plan to force marriage on Helen, a plan the king would carry out with murderous violence against Menelaos. Here we begin to see a strong shift away from the tragic elements of the play and toward the more comic elements. The tragedy of Helen’s undeservedly infamous reputation has already found some relief in the sudden disappearance of the one who caused that dismal reputation, the phantom Helen. With that painful duality done away with, Helen finds happiness in her reunion with her husband, and they can turn their attention toward escaping from Egypt. This scene borrows some of the classic tropes of Greek comedy as Helen constructs her plan: clever lies, costumes, and an elaborate ruse to fool the villain.

This section of the play also sees the use of another mainstay of ancient Greek theater, the choral ode. While previous scenes have shown Helen and Menelaos offering their own monologues, those speeches were always directly tied to the immediate plot. Here, however, the Chorus offers a song in lines 1186-1256 that touches on many of the themes of the play, but that also possesses a degree of its own independence, offering a break in the narrative action before the arrival of Theoklymenos. In the voice of the Chorus, we find the strongest statement yet regarding the third of the major themes seen in the previous sections: the costs of war and the associated folly of trying to divine the will of the gods. The Chorus relates the pain suffered on both sides of the war: “the lamentable suffering of the men of Troy who faced the Grecian spears” (1194-95), and the fact that “thousands of Greeks now haunt the underworld, whose desolate wives have shorn their hair, whose widowed homes still mourn” (1205-07). Tied into the cost of war is the foolishness of trying to discern the plans of the gods, which in the ancient world was often tied to any military action. In the center of their ode on the folly of war, the Chorus reminds the audience that “every man has seen the plans of the gods lurching here and there and back again in unexpected and absurd vicissitudes” (1225-29). They close their song with a fierce rebuke against using war to solve disputes.

The two other themes from previous sections continue to appear here. The theme of appearance versus reality now reveals itself primarily in the context of Helen’s ruse, in which the appearance of affairs portrayed to King Theoklymenos is intentionally different from the reality. Throughout the play, this theme is also tied to the practice of virtue, especially in regard to the appearance of Helen’s reputation versus the reality of her piety and faithfulness. The main tension regarding Helen’s reputation is resolved with the disappearance of the phantom Helen (though presumably the fallout of her undeserved infamy will be a continual burden throughout the rest of her life), but the themes of virtue and piety still arise consistently, and here they are most notable in the character of Theonöe.

The theme that focuses on women also remains prominent in the play, perhaps more in this section than in any other. Here the limitations of Menelaos’s character stand in sharp contrast with the strikingly sincere and insightful words of both Helen and Theonöe. Helen’s display of self-abasement before Theonöe is compelling, and her pleas are eloquent (the Leader of the Chorus says as much in lines 1014-15: “The words you have spoken, and you yourself still more, arouse my pity”). Menelaos, however, though he strikes a sympathetic character in the play, comes across as rather thick here. He doesn’t see the courage in Helen’s act, nor does he recognize the way it shows her resolve to do anything for his safety, and instead castigates it as “abject, weak behavior” (1019). He chooses to appeal to Theonöe by directing his plea to her dead father’s tomb, and then by threatening to kill her brother Theoklymenos, himself, and Helen if things don’t go his way. Theonöe, in her response, shows herself to be wise, articulate, and principled, even in the face of her brother’s future wrath.

Helen, likewise, shines in contrast to Menelaos in the following scene, as they try to make a plan together for their escape. Menelaos tries twice to make an escape plan, but both of his ideas have obvious flaws that Helen must point out to him (1115-22). Then Helen takes the lead, stating firmly that “a woman can plan wisely too” (1125). She goes on to lay out the whole plan in detail, and by the end of the sequence, Menelaos is reduced to asking her to tell him exactly what he is supposed to do. Her sharp-eyed intelligence comes to the fore, and the king of Sparta is forced to take the role of a follower. After the choral ode, this reversal of cultural gender roles is played out again, as Helen quickly and easily outsmarts King Theoklymenos and gets him to say yes to her proposal, even though the funeral rite she proposes to undertake is not a traditional Greek custom, but simply the product of her own quick thinking.