Excuse Me Euripides, But Is This A Tragedy?

Kate Farrington

Artistic Associate

Her name is Helen. You know the story. 

How Aphrodite bribed Paris, Prince of Troy, with the promise of Helen’s hand in marriage. How Paris came to Sparta, wooing and winning Helen from her husband, King Menelaus and spiriting her away to Troy. How the kings of Greece raised an army to win her back. How their decade-long war cost the lives of thousands and brought Troy to ruin. As Helen herself sighs: “So many souls have died for me.”

But Euripides’ Helen (a play that’s anything but “tragic”) makes a bold pronouncement—everything you think you know is wrong. This is not the tale of Helen of Troy, loveliest of women, fabled seductress. This is the story of Helen of Sparta, a loyal wife and lonely exile, who greets us at the gates of an Egyptian palace with secrets to reveal. “I would like to tell the things I’ve suffered,” she begins. And before her story comes to a close, you might find yourself encountering the impossible—a happy ending to a story of Troy. 

Euripides is the last-born of the ancient Greek playwrights whose work survives—and definitely the quirkiest. His plays defy easy category, lacing tragedy with sly humor and puncturing grandiose storytelling with sudden shifts in tone and mood. 

Above all, he relishes the unexpected story. He takes myths familiar to his audience and re-imagines them from surprising viewpoints or undermines conventional plot points with bizarre twists, often emphasizing the uncertainty of human existence. And yes, more often than not, he sees the tragedy in that knowledge. He follows the fates of children caught up in the crimes of parents, of desperate parents unable to save their children, of wives tormented by husbands’ actions, of hapless mortals destroyed in divine crossfire. 

But now and again, he re-writes the story to give mere mortals a break. 

Enter Helen.

She tells us that the beautiful “Helen” Paris ran away with was a trick of the gods—a copy, fashioned of air, that dissolved at the end of the war. Meanwhile she, the real Helen, languished in Egypt, safe from the bloody conflict fought in her name but miserable at the thought that everyone, from the kings of Greece to her own family, holds her responsible for the carnage. 

But all that is about to change. 

A twist of fate (or divine intervention?) has brought a shipwrecked Greek vessel to Egypt’s coast—a ship bearing none other than Helen’s weary husband Menelaus. An ecstatic Helen and a mind-blown Menelaus are reunited at last. And it’s not a minute too soon, because the king of Egypt has his eye on the beautiful Helen, and it’s going to take all their combined cunning to get safely back home to Greece.

Translator Emily Wilson states that the play’s genre-defying feel was a “daring move” on the part of the playwright, offering a mix of romance and action-adventure that’s as far from the conventional Greek tragedy as you can get. What was the playwright looking to explore with his “hot take” on this familiar tale?

Perhaps Euripides was reminding his Athenian audience, themselves embroiled in a war with Sparta that had nearly devastated their resources, of the awful absurdity of war. In Helen, a nameless Greek servant, learning Helen’s story, cries out in indignation: “We suffered for no reason? For a cloud?” Who really knows why we fight? And who really knows if the cause is ever worth the cost?

But what if—and this, for me, is a most intriguing option—what if Helen is the classic “plot twist” story writ large, writ existentially, in fact? Say the gods are cruel, say that fate is fickle, say that human life, yes, is all too often a bleak and chaotic existence.   

But….

If life is as much about luck and destiny—or destiny and luck!—perhaps we can do more than we think. Perhaps we can choose our happy endings and work to make them come true. Maybe, with a little cunning and a little—dare I say it? —hubris, even the likes of Helen can break out of the mold and make their own happiness.  

Maybe, we all can.

Euripides may be sending us the most uplifting message a Greek tragedy ever offered.