Helen

The choral ode that opens this section feels strangely out of place and has led some scholars to theorize that it is evidence of a hasty and slipshod job by Euripides. However, it is important to understand that classical Greek plays were not usually meant to be standalone productions; they were composed to be shown in trilogies. Helen was performed along with Euripides’s lost play Andromeda and one other work—possibly his Iphigenia in Tauris, which appeared around the same time as Helen and which has a very similar plot. All three plays have to do with a lost heroine being saved and brought home, and this broad unity does indeed appear to tie in with the content of the choral ode, which focuses on the goddess Demeter’s search for her lost daughter Persephone. There is also a reference in the ode to a sin of Helen’s, a penchant for focusing on her own beauty (1444-45, 1459), perhaps alluding to a character flaw that lay at the root of Helen’s troubles, many years before the events of Helen began. It is useful to note that this reference, which feels out of harmony with the rest of Helen, fits rather well with some references to beauty that appear in the few extant fragments of Andromeda. With this information in view, it is possible that the choral ode about Demeter was meant to fit the overall themes and content of the trilogy (rather than merely this individual play), and that it is intended to tie the three plays together.

The final section of the play brings the comic resolution of the climax: Helen and Menelaos pull off their ruse and escape, on their way back to a happy life in Greece. The closing scene relies on a literary device known as a deus ex machina, which refers to using the sudden appearance of a highly unlikely solution, bringing a previously insoluble problem to its resolution. In this case, the problem is Theoklymenos’s unassuageable wrath, which is solved by the appearance of Kastor and Polydeukes—although one can make the case that the main tensions of the plot had already been resolved before the deus ex machina.

Kastor and Polydeukes themselves are symbolic of the comic turn at the end of the play because they are Helen’s brothers, born by Zeus to their mother, Leda. In fact, they are the very brothers of whom Teucer speaks in the first section, telling Helen that they were gone, either dead or deified. Helen herself lamented to the Chorus that “Kastor and his twin-born brother will never, never be seen again” (217-18). Here that opening ambiguity has been solved and Helen’s despair answered with hope: Her brothers were deified, and they are seen again. Their appearance serves not only to make Theoklymenos stand down, but also to bring the story full circle to its happy ending, by restoring yet one more part of Helen’s broken family.

The main thematic threads in previous sections also appear in the final scenes, though in a somewhat more muted form, as Euripides appears mostly concerned with wrapping up the narrative of the plot. The moral and intellectual status of women is once again valorized at the end of the play, with Theoklymenos conceding that Helen is virtuous, noble, and intelligent (1782-84). The actions of the female Leader of the Chorus, in trying to prevent the king’s murderous rage, also bring to the forefront the contrast between female virtue and male intemperance. The final summation, spoken by the Chorus, repeats the anti-divination theme that appears so prominently throughout the play: “The divine will shows itself in many forms. The gods dispose many things unexpectedly, and what we base certainty on may never take place” (1785-88).