Summary
Third Episode
Menelaus enters, proclaiming that he is here to lay hands on his wife and confront the man who, as a guest in his home, stole his wife from him. Paris has paid for his crime, but now Menelaus is here for Helen. He is not happy to say her name. He knows that she is here, and he knows that so many men were lost trying to take her alive.
Menelaus is not sure if he wants to kill Helen or take her back to Argos, but he decides that it would be best to take her away for execution. He orders his men to procure her.
Hecuba addresses Zeus; Menelaus hears her and asks what she means. Hecuba warns him of Helen, who makes men captive with desire, and whose charms are ruinous.
Helen is escorted out. She is dressed finely and her hair is plaited. She condemns her rude treatment and asks her husband if she is to live or die. He replies that the army voted to surrender her to him to put her to death. She asks if she can respond. Menelaus is uninterested, but Hecuba suggests that he give her a hearing, if only so he can hear Hecuba respond to her. He assents, but he says that they must not misunderstand him: it is only because he is interested in what Hecuba will say, not Helen.
Helen announces that she will refute the charges against her. First, she says, it was Hecuba who caused all this trouble when she birthed Paris, and she and Priam should have destroyed the infant. That did not happen, so the story unfolded: Paris met the three goddesses and judged them, with Aphrodite as the victor. Helen feels unjustly blamed for her beauty; she could not control that Paris came to her house as a destroyer since Aphrodite accompanied him.
In fact, Helen continues, she would not have gone with Paris and betrayed her home and country if it were not for the fact that the goddess possessed her. The goddess should be chastised, not her. Even Zeus, who rules all the gods, is under Aphrodite’s spell.
Helen also acknowledges that people think that she should have gone down to the Argives’ ships after Paris was killed. She claims she did try to do this, but she was prevented from doing so. Why should she be punished? She was forced to marry Paris and her life in Troy was bitter.
The chorus rebukes her and asks Hecuba to reply.
Hecuba first defends the three goddesses, calling Helen’s story ludicrous. Helen should not try to make fools of the gods; it is unseemly. Also, it was Helen who fell for Hecuba’s handsome son, Paris, and who wanted to come to Troy, hoping to be showered with gifts and luxuries. It is ridiculous to say that Paris brought her here violently; when did she scream? As soon as she arrived, though, men began to die. When she heard that Menelaus was prevailing, she cast her support to him; when she heard that Paris was prevailing, then she supported that man. Helen only keeps her eye on Fortune and herself. A decent woman, Hecuba says, would have killed herself. Hecuba had even volunteered to help Helen get out, but she “lived proud and peevish in Alexander’s house (83). She wanted to live as she did, and even now, she should be dressed in mourning instead of in this get-up. Hecuba concludes by calling on Menelaus to kill Helen. The chorus adds its agreement.
Menelaus confirms that Hecuba’s mood matches his own. His adulteress wife will meet a quick death by stoning.
Helen begs him to reconsider and claims she was visited by a sickness from the gods. Hecuba scoffs at this and warns Menelaus not to let Helen on his own ship. He does not know why she says that, but he replies that Helen will go on a different one than he. To him, she is a shameful woman and will enjoy a shameful death.
The chorus begins their final ode, speaking of the world as divided into three levels: the heights where the gods reside, the earth, and the underworld. They begin to imagine Troy as it once was, glorious and filled with song. The women are destined to go far away from it, though, forever separated from their city and the place where their husbands died.
Hecuba sings with the chorus, dreaming of retribution for Helen as she mourns her own future as a slave.
The chorus sees Talthybios returning with his attendants, who are carrying Astyanax’s body. Hecuba announces that the women must look at this boy’s body.
Talthybios tells Hecuba that Andromache is already gone. She was a tragic sight as she asked Neoptolemos to bury the child with Hector’s shield. That man had to depart due to troubles at home, so Andromache wanted the boy brought to Hecuba. Talthybios says that he has washed the body and cleansed its wounds; he will dig a grave and then he and his men will leave.
Hecuba lowers herself to the ground, mourning the boy. Aloud she asks why the Achaeans feared him so greatly that they could not let him grow up. She feels no respect for those governed by their fear. She decides not to conceal the boy’s brutal wounds, kissing his little hands and sweet lips. It is absurd to her that she is an old woman and is burying a young child. The epitaph for his gravestone will be “THE ARGIVES KILLED THIS CHILD / IN FEAR OF HIM” (90). His father’s bronze-backed shield will be his coffin.
She hands an embroidered robe to the women and tells them to adorn the boy’s body. She muses sadly that “the highs and lows of our life / are a lunatic, who lurches from place to place. / No man can control his own fortune” (91).
Hecuba bids her grandson goodbye and lauds the shield of Hector, bitterly saying that it is more precious than the coward Odysseus’s arms.
Hecuba wraps the boy’s boy and comforts him that his father will take over for her in the Nether World.
The chorus and Hecuba join together. Hecuba marvels that no one would sing of Troy if this tragedy, specifically created for Troy by the gods, had never happened.
Hecuba notices men carrying torches to light the walls of Troy and groans in anguish. Talthybios calls out to those men to start the fires and for the Trojan women to start moving out to the ships. He specifically tells Hecuba to go to Odysseus, for she is now his slave.
Hecuba turns to the walls of Troy for her final farewell, and she wonders why she even feels compelled to call on the gods. She wishes that she could perish here and wants to throw herself into the fire.
Talthybios is irritated at her suffering and orders her to be restrained and taken away.
Hecuba and the chorus sing of Troy’s burning. They call to their dead husbands and speak of their new sorrows.
Hecuba is pulled to her feet and taken away. The chorus sings one more time of the “long-suffering city” (97) as it burns.
Analysis
Besides Talthybios, the only Greek who plays a role in the play is Menelaus, here to confront Paris and to collect his wife. Since Paris is dead, only the latter is possible, and he plans to bring Helen home and put her to death. Menelaus appears to be a weak, spiteful character, not to mention a misogynist and one who is deeply concerned with preserving his own vestiges of manliness: he says that “this shameless woman / will die a shameful death and teach all of womankind a lesson / in restraint” (84-5). He doesn’t seem to know why the war was fought and somehow thinks that the killing of one woman will justify the loss of thousands of lives (and, ironically, Helen will charm him again, survive, and live a long life).
The centerpiece of the Third Episode is the rhapsodic exchange between Helen and Hecuba. It is an agon, a contest with a set of speeches, frequently part of Euripidean drama. Helen breaks judicial procedure by going first before the accusation against her has been levied; however, it is also a rule in Greek drama that the stronger voice is second, so Hecuba going after Helen matters as well. Helen is a striking contrast to Hecuba in terms of her deportment and appearance. She is dressed finely and protests the rude treatment at the hands of the guards. She is confident, brash, and haughty. In her speech, she refuses to take the blame for any of what has transpired, displacing it onto Hecuba and Priam, Paris, and Aphrodite. She sees herself as an innocent victim and feels no guilt. Hecuba easily slaps down her points, and Helen will return with Menelaus to Sparta. She does, however, win out in the end because she is able to use her beauty and charm to keep Menelaus from killing her, which only reinforces how futile war really is: this war to procure Helen cost thousands of lives, and for what?
After Hecuba cuts down Helen and Menelaus takes her away, Hecuba faces the body of Astyanax brought in on Hector’s shield. It is a potent image—one that, as Raymond Anselment writes, “emblematic of the total dramatic experience in The Trojan Women. The dead boy and the captured shield suggest the father and son reunited both in death and defeat.”
The burning of the city is a pitiful coda to Astyanax’s death, which indelibly signified that Troy, as it was and could have been, truly is gone. The depth and breadth of the destruction are astonishing; it is, as critic Adrian Poole writes, “a total disaster,” a Gotterdammerung, a complete end of a world. He describes it the main images as “evacuation, a dispersal, a demolition, an obliteration—literally, of a city and its people, but also at a wider level, of a whole set of ideas, ideals, and values.” There is the sense of an aching, open wound; an absence where there was once presence.
Poole also suggests the departure of the gods as a salient theme. At the beginning of the play, Poseidon is preparing to leave and never return, but his presence on the walls of Troy feels off anyway. Where was he during the war? Why is he so impassive and dismissive now? He is nothing if not remote, a feeling which manifests itself in Hecuba’s laments that the gods are merely “craven allies” (57), that Zeus is cruel, that “the gods never really cared, or, if they cared, / they cared / for my sufferings / and for Troy, a city they picked out for their special hate” (93). She wonders, “why should I call upon the gods? / In the past they have not listened when we called upon them” (95). Indeed, at one point, she even wonders if Zeus is “the Necessity of Nature or Human / Intelligence” (77). The gods have long been seen as fickle, but here they don’t really seem to be around at all. Hecuba blames Helen, not the gods, for the Trojan War, focusing on human responsibility. Diskin Clay says succinctly, “the gods of The Trojan Women are remote from humans and indifferent to human religion.” The humans and the gods are irrevocably severed, as seen in the staging of Poseidon and Athena on the walls with Hecuba and the others below.
Overall, Euripides asserts the hollowness of victory, the sheer irrationality of war, and how war disproportionately affects women and children. He creates a situation, as Raymond Anselment notes, in which “the audience…cannot maintain a detached passivity; Euripides involves them in a dramatic experience which demands that they try to tolerate the paradoxically meaningful and meaningless void.” There is tremendous ambiguity in the ending as well, for Euripides has painted a nuanced picture of hope intermingled with futility, with resilience intermingled with abject brokenness. Are we to walk away extolling the strength and greatness of (wo)mankind even in the face of such trauma? Or are we to bravely admit that the play demands that we fully face what a world devoid of hope and meaning looks like?
