EPISODE ONE: ENTER
CASSANDRA
As much as Trojan
Women reminds me of Beckett, it also reminds me of Brecht. There is framing and
distancing and intellect and irony and a stark contrast between speech and
song. In the first episode, we will see all of that.
Hecuba’s anxiety
in this short scene between herself and the herald Talthybius is stressed by
the fact that she is given lyric lines while he speaks in prosaic iambic
trimeters. (Euripides does this often, as in the death scene of the Alcestis,
where the dying mother and wife speaks in lyric lines while Admetus, slow and
uncomprehending, utter trimeters. Only when Alcestis has fainted does Admetus
go into lyric himself. ) Talthybius does not understand why anyone should want
a half-crazed priestess like Cassandra, nor can he understand why it is not an
honor to be ordered to serve a king. Talthybius does not understand much.
Running from her
tent with two torches, Cassandra sings a lyric monody in a mixture of dochmaic
metre, resolved iambics and glyconics. Dochmaics are associated with high
excitement. Cassandra’s entrance
song, for the audience who knows of her impending doom, is a horrible
conflation of a wedding hymn and a funeral dirge. Cassandra,
like her mother before her, makes a connection between the song and dance she
now performs and the dancing of happier days, providing a meaningful and
traditional contrast between past and present: “Raise your foot on high, lead
on the dance—Euan, Euoi!—as in the happiest times when my father was alive” (Trojan
Women 325-328). Since
the torch was used at Bacchanals as well as weddings, and Hecuba calls Cassandra’s
raving state mainas ( 349) a word used
of Bacchic revelers) Cassandra uses
Bacchic cries, “Euhan Euhoi “ (326).
Talthybius mixes up Apollo and Dionysus when he says the god made her mind
foggy.
There is a stroke
of genius here in portraying madness as normality gone wrong. Or rather
inappropriately applied in the right circumstance this would be a perfectly natural song for a
Trojan princess to sing on her wedding day. Perhaps her madness protects her
from seeing her fate as it really is, or perhaps it is what gives her the
insight to be tragically sarcastic. Cassandra is a virgin priestess and has never
contemplated marriage in her future, which increases the irony, if that’s
possible.
In the calmer, spoken
iambic portions which follow, ( 353ff) she is actually quite lucid, but in her
prophetess mode. This seems somehow reversed. In Aeschylus (Agamemnon)
Cassandra’s prophesying comes in a fit of trance, whereas for Euripides’
Cassandra the fit is over when the accurate fortune telling begins with clarity
and normal speech patterns. She makes an insightful observation about how the
Greeks have lost more than they took from the Trojans, lost ten years away from
their homelands and loved ones, while Trojans stayed together as families to
the end. The dead Greeks will be buried
in a foreign land, the Trojans at home. Cassandra takes legitimate pride in
knowing she will ultimately defeat Agamemnon and avenge Troy by pushing
Clytemnestra over the edge so that she and her lover kill the King. It doesn’t
matter to Cassandra that she will also die, because she gets her revenge and
does. as a mere woman, a mere victim, something even her brother Hector could
not do. Posthumous fame seems to be a strong source of consolation to
the defeated Trojans. Without the war,
Hector’s bravery “would have escaped notice.”
Cassandra now goes
into trochaic tetrameters. The change in meter brings emphasis to her closing
lines which spell out more clearly than before the horror of her own death and
that of Agamemnon. Cassandra creates a graphic image of her death as she does
in Aeschylus (Ag. 1260ff.) She discards
the marks of her office as a priestess
of Apollo in both plays, throwing them down in anger in Aeschylus, but in
Euripides, saying goodbye to the god and letting the wind carry her garland way
gently.
Cassandra herself is not deluded either about what her “marriage”
means; she proceeds to foretell the murders that await them upon arrival in
Argos. Cassandra takes comfort in the knowledge that she will not be unavenged:
“For if there is a Loxias, in me the renowned lord of the Achaeans Agamemnon
will find a more disastrous marriage than Helen’s” (εἰ γὰρ ἔστι Λοξίας,/Ἑλένης
γαμεῖ με δυσχερέστερον γάμον/ὁ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν κλεινὸς Ἀγαμέμνων ἄναξ 356-358). Her
death is the Trojans’ victory: “I will come bearing victory to the dead after
destroying the house of Atreus, by whom we have been cut {144|145} down” (ἥξω
δ' ἐς νεκροὺς νικηφόρος καὶ δόμους πέρσασ' Ἀτρειδῶν, ὧν ἀπωλόμεσθ' ὕπο
460-461). Her predictions are not confined to the fate of Agamemnon; she also
prophesies the wanderings of Odysseus (431-443). In this way Cassandra, like
Athena and Poseidon, looks beyond the confines of the play to the disasters
that await the Greeks upon their departure from Troy.
Therefore Cassandra, too, is the quintessential captive woman, and
in her bridal song come together many important themes. Like Polyxena in
the Hecuba, she stands for the young Trojan women who will never
have marriages, but who will instead become captive concubines and slaves. She
is also set up as the counterpart of Helen. Her “marriage” to Agamemnon will
bring death and destruction from Troy to Argos, just as Helen and Paris brought
destruction from Greece to Troy. Cassandra perhaps does not lament, but she
does get her revenge.
Tomorrow I will translate Cassandra’s predictions for Odysseus (a
summary of the Odyssey, which hasn’t happened yet.) The villainous portrait of
Odysseus adds to the general image of barbarous Greeks. Odysseus was
particularly unscrupulous in his false accusation of Palamedes in the previous
play (lost) of the trilogy. Talthybius later says that it was Odysseus who counseled
that Astyanax should die!
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