41 pages • 1 hour read
EuripidesHelen
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Literary Devices
Plot Twist
Many plays rely on a plot twist to overturn the audience’s assumptions. Helen, however, is unique in that its plot twist comes at the very beginning, in the introduction of the main character, laying the foundations for the whole tone of the play. Euripides’s use of this minor counter-narrative about the Helen story rather than the mainstream version (based on the works of Homer) would have come as a surprise to the audience. There is a second twist regarding Helen—not only a twist regarding her story (namely, that she was in Egypt rather than Troy), but a twist regarding her moral character. Helen was widely assumed to be the worst representative of her gender, a woman driven by vanity and self-seeking pleasure, who by her unfaithfulness to her marriage dragged the world to war. In Helen, however, Euripides presents her as faithful, compassionate, and wise beyond the common expectations of her gender. Through these twists, Euripides both subverts his audience’s expectations and brings the theme of appearance versus reality to the forefront.
Greek Chorus
The use of a chorus is a staple feature of classical Greek drama, and Helen is no exception. The Chorus plays an essential role in the narrative, both helping the main characters process their thoughts and emotions and communicating to the audience by summing up the play’s main themes and practical applications. In Helen, some of the Chorus’s most important work is in the form of choral odes. Notably, the Chorus’s song in lines 1186-1256 touches on many of the themes of the play, in particular Euripides’s theme about the follies of war and divination. Through this choral ode, Euripides further explores the concept of divine will and conveys the argument that the gods are capricious and that therefore any attempt to know or understand the future is futile. Because Helen’s Chorus is composed of captive Greek women, it plays two additional roles, serving as a natural ally to Helen and supporting Euripides’s emphasis on the intelligence and emotional depth of women.
Deus Ex Machina
In the closing scene of Helen, Theoklymenos is prepared to kill Theonöe for her knowing role in Helen and Menelaos’s escape. When it seems her death is imminent, Kastor and Polydeukes appear and talk the king down. This final element of the story relies on a device known as deus ex machina, or the sudden appearance of a highly unlikely solution that resolves a previously unsolvable problem. The Latin name comes directly from the practices of Greek theater, where the actors portraying a sudden appearance of a god were hoisted over the stage on a crane (thus, “a god from the machine”). Whereas this literary device is viewed as evidence of a weak plot structure according to modern fiction conventions, this was probably not the case in Euripides’s time: A deus ex machina resolution was a relatively common feature in ancient theater, particularly so in Euripides’s corpus of plays.
Related Titles
By Euripides
