TALTHYBIUS: No Mere
Messenger, Part One
Trojan Women is the only
extant tragedy by anybody without a messenger speech. Instead we have a Herald.
In ancient Greek culture, heralds as a class of men were suspect. An official
herald was not a mere messenger but served as a sort of “Press Agent” for
royalty. Heralds might have to make announcements of and justifications for the
horrible commands of their tyrannical bosses, for whom they were a front. In gangster terms, the Herald is a bag man as
well as a mouthpiece. Whenever Euripides mentions heralds in his extant plays, it
is usually to scorn them or make fun of them. The most prominent herald, both
in mythology and in tragedy, is Talthybius, who is mentioned early in the Iliad
doing Agamemnon’s dirty work, i.e. taking Briseis back from Achilles. Despite
being a Herald, in Trojan Women, Euripides
draws Talthybius with depth of feeling. The herald famously says, when he has
to take a child away from a mother, “A herald who must bring such orders should be a man who feels no pity
and no shame either... not like me.”
Talthybius is puffed up with self-importance and pride in the glory of Greece; he can scarcely think of anything else. Yet he sympathizes with the women even though he has no real understanding of the tragedy he witnesses. Without a will of his own, Talthybius is as much a slave as the Trojan captives whom he pities. His first word, Hecuba’s name, is very deliberately explained, and suggests that his relationship with the women on stage goes beyond that of a mere bearer of news. His first task is to be the removal of Cassandra for Agamemnon (294–296), and Talthybius was typically regarded as the herald of Agamemnon, but in this play he has a wider range of tasks to perform, including the removal of other prisoners (296–297), the seizure of Astyanax for execution on general orders (710–711), and the giving of the command to the captains to begin the conflagration (1260–1263). The mutual knowledge of Hecuba and Talthybius of each other apparent in his opening words, of course, formally allows him to address her by name immediately and without discourtesy, but there is considerable stress on the fact that Hecuba knows him, as if Euripides thinks it important for us to bear in mind that Talthybius is dealing with someone with whom he has associated in earlier days.
We are meant to register that the women are full of fear and ignorant of what might happen to them, and that the primary place to which they fear to be sent is Sparta. And when they see the herald approach they are plunged into depression and assume that they are as good as slaves already: “We are already slaves of the Dorian land” (233–234). In order to present vividly to the audience, the Chorus’ wretched state of mind, Euripides has enlisted the contemporary hatred of his Athenian countrymen towards Sparta.
Cassandra, Talthybius says, with the implication that
she was not subject to lottery, has been specially selected by Agamemnon (249).
He thus starts with someone whose fate he can call fortunate in direct response
to Hecuba’s question. Hecuba’s shocked but mistaken reaction keeps the hatred
of Sparta before our mind, for Clytemnestra, as the daughter of Tyndareus, is
called strikingly the Lacedaemonian bride (250); Cassandra, however, is not to
be the slave of a Spartan woman, but something which, because she is a virgin
sacred to Apollo, seems even worse and draws from Hecuba a still more horrified
response. All Talthybius does is to ask Hecuba to see that it is a good thing
for Cassandra to share a king’s bed (259).
However, the bare text does not make Talthybius’
attitude so far entirely clear, Cassandra being the first person discussed, and
we are uncertain how to treat the ambiguities. His ensuing report about
Polyxena ( who only he and the audience knows is already dead) is deliberately
evasive, and Hecuba’s acquiescence in his answer may seem dramatically
implausible. “To whom has the lot yoked her?” asks Hecuba (263), the ambiguity hinting
at a fate like Cassandra’s. The reply implies that in her case, too, there was
no lottery at all, for she was appointed as attendant for Achilles’ tomb. If
Talthybius reads Hecuba’s anxiety aright, the verb tãssein corrects and
consoles her, implying that Polyxena, like Cassandra, was chosen as if the very
fact of being appointed raised her above the status of those subject to an
indiscriminate lottery. Hecuba laments her daughter’s fate, but seems to seek
for reassurance that her status has social sanction: “But what Greek custom is
this, my friend?” Philos (friend) is very striking here as being addressed to a
member of the enemy army which has destroyed Troy, and it has been taken as
ironic; perhaps though, it has something of the pleading tone of one who hopes
for confirmation, and it suits a context where the speaker is relieved to have
heard something which rules out a deeper fear, even though we know better. And
if, as lines 237– 238 suggest, Talthybius was well known to Hecuba and reminds
her of that relationship, her address to him as a friend is all the more
intelligible. Her fears are assuaged by someone whom she knows, but the
audience will feel the irony in anticipation of the eventual revelation to
Hecuba of the truth they already know (39–40).
Hecuba’s apparent
satisfaction with the reply that Polyxena’s fate has “freed her from her
troubles” seems to us a conscious denial, but. the direct reference overrules
the ambiguity for Hecuba, who otherwise would have accepted a reply which was
just as ominous as the words which prompted suspicions of Polyxena’s death in
line 268, and Talthybius’ answer would not have assuaged those qualms. Here we
see the decisive impact on his exchange with Hecuba of the gradation of
destinations established in the parodos: Polyxena can be taken to be one who
has in the circumstances done well. Only if we see Talthybius in fact, whether
from sympathy or diplomacy, consoling Hecuba who feared something worse, is her
acceptance of his answer and the immediate transition to the next topic
plausible,
Consistently with the
preceding dialogue Hecuba asks about the lot that has fallen to Cassandra (248)
and Polyxena (263), and, in both cases Talthybius implies that there was no lot
involved in their treatment but special selection. It was suggested that he
thereby implied a superior treatment which might be seen as a consolatory
feature, and if this is the case then the brevity of the exchange about
Andromache is explained: Andromache too has been accorded some distinction,
which could console in the context of the general misery and her dread of the
worst. The final individual discussed is Hecuba herself. There is no special
selection to console her, for she has fallen by lot (277, 282, 292, 1271) to the hated Odysseus, a
circumstance in which she regards herself as ill-fated (290). Yet even so
Talthybius can reassuringly remind her later of the virtues of her
mistress-to-be, the unnamed Penelope (422–423). Whether this consideration is
based on sympathy for her as a mother, or is merely an exercise of the insight
required for getting an unpleasant job done with a minimum of trouble for himself,
or includes something of both, are questions to which the nature of dramatic
language may not offer a sure answer.
But the idea can be
excluded that Euripides would want his audience to see Talthybius here as
cruelly cynical or obtuse, because his later and indubitably positive attitudes
towards Andromache and Hecuba would require a change of heart which would be
unexplained. Between unemotional diplomacy and sympathy, however, the issue is
perhaps beyond the limit of determinability; later developments would be
consistent, whether displaying a more intense expression of a pity already
felt, or arousal of pity in a mind capable of seeing how others feel but hitherto
uninvolved. The remarkable emphasis on their previous acquaintance would tie in
with a degree of personal sympathy of Talthybius for Hecuba, and the preference
here taken is to read his exchange with Hecuba as showing diplomacy colored by
sympathy, a combination of practicality and humanity evinced later in
connection with Andromache and with the burial of Astyanax.
But so far, he has been
answering questions before getting down to work, for all that he entered in a
hurry (232).
Will his actions be consonant
with a favorable interpretation of his conversation?
He is carrying out orders
but his method may well be his own. He shows understanding of what the prospect
of slavery might mean to people accustomed to freedom (302–303), and acts
urgently in case the suicide (which is honorable to them but against Greek
interests might ) lay him open to blame (304–305). He makes allowances for
Cassandra’s forecast of the destruction which she will bring upon Agamemnon,
surely an unpropitious start to a voyage, because he thinks Apollo has made her
mad, as if Apollo is a god who can derange the mind but not one whose prophetic
invasion of a mind foretells the future (408– 410). When Polymestor tells
Agamemnon much the same information he is marooned on a deserted island for the
boldness of his tongue (Hec. 1280–1287). Although the unpropitious quality of
what is said is not affected by the responsibility of the speaker, since omens
are typically not intentional, nevertheless, in his view, because she has no
malice Cassandra will not pay for her words. 15 His failure to feel any threat
to the fleet will contribute to the gulf between them that explains the
ferocity of her subsequent attack. As for her praise of the Trojans and insults
to the Greeks, well, she is deranged and he will disregard it (417–419). Again
he addresses Cassandra directly, and there must be at least irony in his
calling her a fine bride for the commander (420), but though he tells her to
her face that she is not in her right mind the important point is that twice in
fact he takes no offence at what he regards as punishable in the one case and
at least provocative in the other. Of course, his words are hardly models of
deference or tact, but he is not much blunter than is Agave to her father in
Bacch. 1251ff. We should not take the abuse with which Cassandra attacks him as
a decisive pointer to the way Euripides wants us to see Talthybius as a person.
She is dominated by the huge and dreadful future that fills her mind and takes
no cognizance of the Greek herald’s concessions. He is a mere servant, and she
abuses him as one of a hateful breed of political lackeys, wrong about Hecuba’s
fate and in conflict with Apollo’s prophecies (424–430).
The
very fact that he has forgiven her because she has been afflicted with frenzy
by Apollo brings his vision into conflict with hers. They live on different
levels, the herald and the seer, though both are retailers of commands received
from above: he thinks to bring about the world which his masters ordain, but her
mind inhabits a vaster universe whose masters, as we know from the prologue,
have quite different dispositions. We can see that her scorn is fired by her
sense of the chasm between their outlooks—what are tyrants and their lackeys
compared with Apollo’s words?—and what she attacks in Talthybius is not so much
the man as his office. The audience may see that Talthybius is not a heartless
automaton, but from her perspective his only characteristic is ignorance
coupled with a blind assumption of knowledge. Thus she reverts from him to her
visions, and then turns his command (419) on its head by ordering him to be off
to Agamemnon’s ship, which will take her as an Erinys away from her home (445,
456–457).
Talthybius
has apparently acted with restraint independently of the bare requirements of
his commission, and between his addresses to Cassandra he has an aside which
reveals an attitude of mind which is equally independent of his masters. He
himself, poor man though he is, would not have taken this woman for his bed, as
great Agamemnon has chosen to do (413–416). So, he reflects, the high and the
reputed wise are no better than the nobodies (411–412). This is a perspective
which accords with the absence of the mighty from most of the play. Greek
response to Trojan suffering is going to be almost entirely a response of an
ordinary man whose values are based on the world of men, a subordinate who has
someone else’s orders to carry out, but in his own way and with attitudes not
entirely those of his commanders. Above all it is the response of one who is
not a mere spectator of Trojan suffering nor one who can ignore them, but one
who has to deal with the women and inflict upon them wounds of other people’s
causing.
Next time:
Talthybius and Andromache
In the Andromache scene the herald’s sympathy for the
women and the distress which his duties cause him is unmistakable. He is not
identified by name, and the terms of Hecuba’s question “What lackey of the
Greeks do I see this time...?” (707–708) prompted the scholiast and some later
scholars to think that the character entering cannot be Talthybius. 17 Although
all recent editors agree that the entrant is Talthybius, the manner of his
introduction has not received sufficient consideration. We see this, however,
as an important factor in Euripides’ management of this central scene.
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