Strife and Starvation: Euripides’ Helen

Abstract

This paper argues that Euripides’ Helen offers a dual perspective on the divine and mortal realms, a contrast between human ignorance and Olympian agendas. The action deals with the misunderstandings and misfortunes that beset the human protagonists while Euripides’ re-visioned versions of the two primary disaster myths in ancient Greek culture—the Trojan War and Demeter’s famine—subjects of the first and second stasima respectively, provide an informing, contrapuntal tragic subtext. The two stasima tell their stories in vastly different modes, but together they provide etiologies for war and famine, the primary ills of human existence.