Part 14 (1/2)
[1] Poseidon.]--In the _Iliad_ Poseidon is the enemy of Troy, here the friend. This sort of confusion comes from the fact that the Trojans and their Greek enemies were largely of the same blood, with the same tribal G.o.ds. To the Trojans, Athena the War-G.o.ddess was, of course, _their_ War-G.o.ddess, the protectress of their citadel. Poseidon, G.o.d of the sea and its merchandise, and Apollo (possibly a local shepherd G.o.d?), were their natural friends and had actually built their city wall for love of the good old king, Laomedon. Zeus, the great father, had Mount Ida for his holy hill and Troy for his peculiar city. (Cf. on p. 63.)
To suit the Greek point of view all this had to be changed or explained away. In the _Iliad_ generally Athena is the proper War-G.o.ddess of the Greeks. Poseidon had indeed built the wall for Laomedon, but Laomedon had cheated him of his reward--as afterwards he cheated Heracles, and the Argonauts and everybody else! So Poseidon hated Troy. Troy is chiefly defended by the barbarian Ares, the oriental Aphrodite, by its own rivers Scamander and Simois and suchlike inferior or unprincipled G.o.ds.
Yet traces of the other tradition remain. Homer knows that Athena is specially wors.h.i.+pped in Troy. He knows that Apollo, who had built the wall with Poseidon, and had the same experience of Laomedon, still loves the Trojans. Zeus himself, though eventually in obedience to destiny he permits the fall of the city, nevertheless has a great tenderness towards it.
[2] A steed marvellous.]--See below, on p. 36.
[3] go forth from great Ilion, &c.]--The correct ancient doctrine. When your G.o.ds forsook you, there was no more hope. Conversely, when your state became desperate, evidently your G.o.ds were forsaking you. From another point of view, also, when the city was desolate and unable to wors.h.i.+p its G.o.ds, the G.o.ds of that city were no more.
[4] Laotian Tyndarid.]--Helen was the child of Zeus and Leda, and sister of Castor and Polydeuces; but her human father was Tyndareus, an old Spartan king. She is treated as ”a prisoner and a prize,” _i.e_., as a captured enemy, not as a Greek princess delivered from the Trojans.
[5] In secret slain.]--Because the Greeks were ashamed of the b.l.o.o.d.y deed. See below, p. 42, and the scene on this subject in the _Hecuba_.
[6] Ca.s.sandra.]--In the _Agamemnon_ the story is more clearly told, that Ca.s.sandra was loved by Apollo and endowed by him with the power of prophecy; then in some way she rejected or betrayed him, and he set upon her the curse that though seeing the truth she should never be believed.
The figure of Ca.s.sandra in this play is not inconsistent with that version, but it makes a different impression. She is here a dedicated virgin, and her mystic love for Apollo does not seem to have suffered any breach.
[7] Pallas.]--(See above.) The historical explanation of the Trojan Pallas and the Greek Pallas is simple enough; but as soon as the two are mythologically personified and made one, there emerges just such a bitter and ruthless G.o.ddess as Euripides, in his revolt against the current mythology, loved to depict. But it is not only the mythology that he is attacking. He seems really to feel that if there are conscious G.o.ds ruling the world, they are cruel or ”inhuman” beings.
[8]--Ajax the Less, son of Oleus, either ravished or attempted to ravish Ca.s.sandra (the story occurs in both forms) while she was clinging to the Palladium or image of Pallas. It is one of the great typical sins of the Sack of Troy, often depicted on vases.
[9] Faces of s.h.i.+ps.]--Homeric s.h.i.+ps had prows shaped and painted to look like birds' or beasts' heads. A s.h.i.+p was always a wonderfully live and vivid thing to the Greek poets. (Cf. p. 64.)
[10] Castor.]--Helen's brother: the Eurotas, the river of her home, Sparta.
[11] Fifty seeds.]--Priam had fifty children, nineteen of them children of Hecuba (_Il_. vi. 451, &c.).
[12] Pirene.]--The celebrated spring on the hill of Corinth. Drawing water was a typical employment of slaves.
[13] ff., Theseus' land, &c.]--Theseus' land is Attica. The poet, in the midst of his bitterness over the present conduct of his city, clings the more to its old fame for humanity. The ”land high-born” where the Peneus flows round the base of Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly is one of the haunts of Euripides' dreams in many plays. Cf. _Bacchae_, 410 (p. 97 in my translation). Mount Aetna fronts the ”Tyrians' citadel,” _i.e._., Carthage, built by the Phoenicians. The ”sister land” is the district of Sybaris in South Italy, where the river Crathis has, or had, a red-gold colour, which makes golden the hair of men and the fleeces of sheep; and the water never lost its freshness.
[14] Talthybius is a loyal soldier with every wish to be kind. But he is naturally in good spirits over the satisfactory end of the war, and his tact is not sufficient to enable him to understand the Trojan Women's feelings. Yet in the end, since he has to see and do the cruelties which his Chiefs only order from a distance, the real nature of his work forces itself upon him, and he feels and speaks at times almost like a Trojan. It is worth noticing how the Trojan Women generally avoid addressing him. (Cf. pp. 48, 67, 74.)
[15] The haunted keys (literally, ”with G.o.d through them, penetrating them”).]--Ca.s.sandra was his Key-bearer, holding the door of his Holy Place. (Cf. _ Hip_. 540, p. 30.)
[16] She hath a toil, &c.]--There is something true and pathetic about this curious blindness which prevents Hecuba from understanding ”so plain a riddle.” (Cf. below, p. 42.) She takes the watching of a Tomb to be some strange Greek custom, and does not seek to have it explained further.
[17] Odysseus.]--In Euripides generally Odysseus is the type of the successful unscrupulous man, as soldier and politician--the incarnation of what the poet most hated. In Homer of course he is totally different.
[18] Burn themselves and die.]--Women under these circ.u.mstances did commit suicide in Euripides' day, as they have ever since. It is rather curious that none of the characters of the play, not even Andromache, kills herself. The explanation must be that no such suicide was recorded in the tradition (though cf. below, on p. 33); a significant fact, suggesting that in the Homeric age, when this kind of treatment of women captives was regular, the victims did not suffer quite so terribly under it.
[19] Hymen.]--She addresses the Torch. The shadowy Marriage-G.o.d ”Hymen”
was a torch and a cry as much as anything more personal. As a torch he is the sign both of marriage and of death, of sunrise and of the consuming fire. The full Moon was specially connected with marriage ceremonies.
[20] Loxias.]--The name of Apollo as an Oracular G.o.d.
[21] Ca.s.sandra's visions.]--The allusions are to the various sufferings of Odysseus, as narrated in the _Odyssey_, and to the tragedies of the house of Atreus, as told for instance in Aeschylus' _Oresteia_.
Agamemnon together with Ca.s.sandra, and in part because he brought Ca.s.sandra, was murdered--felled with an axe--on his return home by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Their bodies were cast into a pit among the rocks. In vengeance for this, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, committed ”mother-murder,” and in consequence was driven by the Erinyes (Furies) of his mother into madness and exile.
[22] This their king so wise.]--Agamemnon made the war for the sake of his brother Menelaus, and slew his daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice at Aulis, to enable the s.h.i.+ps to sail for Troy.
[23] Hector and Paris.]--The point about Hector is clear, but as to Paris, the feeling that, after all, it was a glory that he and the half-divine Helen loved each other, is scarcely to be found anywhere else in Greek literature. (Cf., however, Isocrates' ”Praise of Helen.”) Paris and Helen were never idealised like Launcelot and Guinevere, or Tristram and Iseult.