Bound and Determined: Euripides' Andromache

ἐκ τίνος λόγου νοσεῖ/ δόμος; - -n account of what logos does this house grow diseased? - is nearly the first sentence uttered by Peleus in Euripides’ Andromache (548-49). This infection-bringing logos has generally been considered the wanton and unrestrained speech of Hermione, which has brought Andromache to her current perilous position as supplicant woman pleading for the life of her son (McClure 1999). And yet Peleus’s question follows fast upon Menelaos’s lurid insistence on the murder of yet another child, as he evokes the stony pitilessness of Achilles in Iliad XVI (A 536-44; I 16.34). The link between the nosos destroying the house of Neoptolemos and the events of Troy is made explicit by the chorus at the close of the play in the fourth and final stasimon, immediately prior to their exodus and Peleus’s reappearance. Recounting the building of Troy by Apollo’s hand, and lamenting not only the destruction of that city and its kings, but also the subsequent deaths of Agamemnon and Neoptolemos (1010-36), the chorus exclaims, “νόσον Ἑλλὰς ἔτλα, νόσον” (1044). The sickness plaguing Greece is the logos of Troy. King (1985) and Thalmann (1993) both write of Euripides’ assaults on the authority of Homer and Aeschylos (respectively) in his Hecuba, a play in which the tragedian seems compelled replay and redefine the events at both Troy and Aulis, in such a manner as not only to condemn the values and violence displayed therein, but also to critique the roles of these narratives in his own 5th-century Athenian culture. I propose that the logos of Troy functions in the Andromache with the same deleterious effect the playwright believes it have in Athens, from the first stasimon where the chorus compares the arguments of Hermione to the δολίοις λόγοις (289) used by Aphrodite on Ida to the δυσμενεῖς λόγους spread by Orestes among the Delphians to poison them against Neoptolemos (1091). If the Hecuba can be seen as an assault upon the war-privileging heroic value system and the culture that grants it primacy, then the Andromache dramatizes its failure and collapse as it attempts to function in what is left of the world left after the war. The most successful characters in the Andromache are those whose actions are least like the bold and physically assured heroes of epic and earlier tragedy. The captive bride Andromache - enormously successful in this play - bests Hermione and Menelaos with lament. The old man Peleus bests Menelaos with words - harsh words, to be sure, but words behind which no true physical threat can be found. On the other hand, the brash warrior Neoptolemos is killed by means of the gossip spread by Orestes. Amidst a group comprised of the young and old, slave and free, male and female, it is male heroes of epic - Menelaos and Neoptolemos - who are the play’s least successful. They fail - quite differently - in trying to recapitulate the actions and situations that formerly made them great and in trying to adjust to a different sort of action. If the Trojan War is over, its heroes and their values are too.