But when Euripides has Helen arrive onstage, immediately after Hecabe has demanded that Menelaus kill her, he presents things rather differently. His Helen is nowhere near as accepting of either sole or major responsibility for the war. She is on trial for her life, albeit somewhat after the fact; the whole Greek army has already decided that she deserves to die: ‘They gave you to me to kill,’ Menelaus tells her.15 So Helen makes what we recognize as the speech for the defence that she didn’t receive, as her death sentence was decided in her absence. It is a dazzling piece of writing: a legal defence, given in verse, which makes the audience wonder if Euripides should have turned his hand to the law during the theatrical off-season.
Helen begins by saying that, because Menelaus regards her as an enemy, he doubtless won’t answer no matter how well she speaks.16 So she will reply to the charges she suspects her husband will level at her, and offer a few counter charges in return. She goes immediately on the offensive. Firstly, she says, Hecabe is to blame for the war because she’s the one who gave birth to Paris. Priam had a prophetic dream about his son when Paris was born, and still he wouldn’t kill him. As we’ve already seen with Oedipus, this may sound unreasonable to us, but the world of Bronze Age myth is full of children being killed by their parents for various reasons. Even in the fifth century BCE, when Euripides’ play was being performed, the exposure of unwanted children was commonplace. Although to modern ears, the argument ‘You ignored a prophecy about your child and didn’t kill him’ might not cut too much ice, it is reasonable to suspect that Euripides’ audience might have been more ambivalent. And indeed the question is concrete and mathematical for Hecabe: if she and Priam had killed Paris as a baby, their many other sons might not have died in the war Paris started. It’s not just a question of preferring the life of her child over the lives of the rest of the Trojan citizens. It’s about choosing one child’s life （lost now, anyway, at the end of the war） over many of her other children’s lives. In the scene Euripides placed just before this one, Hecabe had watched as her grandson, Astyanax （the son of her son Hector, and his wife, Andromache）， was taken away to be killed by the Greeks because they didn’t want him to grow up to avenge his late father, the greatest of all the Trojan warriors. The ramifications of Hecabe’s choice are painfully real and recent, both for her and for the audience watching the play.
Helen then turns to the divine cause of the Trojan War, which again puts responsibility with Paris and with the goddess, Aphrodite, who assists him. She describes the judgement of Paris, in which he is asked to choose which goddess – Aphrodite, Athene or Hera – is prettiest and should therefore be the recipient of a golden apple inscribed ‘To the Most Beautiful’ （this cause of the war is barely mentioned by Homer and even then it isn’t until the final book of the Iliad）。17 Helen mentions that the goddesses all tried to bribe him to get the result each desired: Athene offered him the power to destroy the Greeks in war, Hera offered him a kingdom encompassing Asia and Europe. But Aphrodite, Helen says, praising my appearance, offered me to him if he said she was most beautiful. In other words, Paris was responsible for choosing as he did, the goddesses were responsible for bribing him, and Aphrodite was the one who offered Helen to Paris with no thought for anyone else （the gods are often portrayed as thoughtless brats in Euripides’ plays）。 Helen is collateral damage. In fact, she goes further, suggesting that, if Paris had preferred one of the other goddesses, Menelaus might well have found himself conquered by a barbarian army or ruled by a barbarian king, namely Paris. Greece got lucky, Helen says. I was destroyed. Sold for my beauty. I’m reproached by you; you should put a crown on my head.18
Now, Helen continues, it is time to consider the main charge. At this point, it seems only fair to say that no version of Menelaus in any telling of their story conveys the intellectual capacity to argue with a woman of such considerable cleverness. Maybe Odysseus could have taken her on, but not Menelaus. Euripides loved to write clever women, he does it over and over again: it is one of a thousand wonderful things about him.
So, why did Helen sneak off from her marital home with Paris? Again, she cites Aphrodite as the cause: Paris was accompanied by not a minor god, she says. The Greeks often employed litotes – deliberate understatement – in their legal speeches. And Helen uses it perfectly here: Aphrodite is one of the most powerful gods there is, so describing her as ‘not minor’ reminds us just how fearsome she is. And Menelaus doesn’t dodge blame either. O kakiste, Helen says – you’re the absolute worst. You left him – Paris – in your Spartan home while you went off to Crete.19 This is another point which would have resonated with the play’s fifth-century BCE audience. Athenian wives （certainly the wives of wealthy Athenians） would never have been left alone in their homes with a strange man. Athenian laws revealed an almost neurotic fear that another man might somehow impregnate your wife. Although Helen’s point might not carry much weight with a modern audience, it certainly would have done with Euripides’ audience. A respectable male citizen would not leave his wife alone in the company of any man who wasn’t either her brother or her father.