about Helen in this play; she fills
the background like a great well-spring of pain.

This Menelaus, however, is rather different from the traditional
Menelaus. Besides being the husband of Helen, he is the typical
Conqueror, for whose sake the Greeks fought and to whom the central
prize of the war belongs. And we take him at the height of his triumph,
the very moment for which he made the war! Hence the peculiar bitterness
with which he is treated, his conquest turning to ashes in his mouth,
and his love a confused turmoil of hunger and hatred, contemptible and
yet terrible.

The exit of the scene would leave a modern audience quite in doubt as to
what happened, unless the action were much clearer than the words. But
all Athenians knew from the _Odyssey_ that the pair were swiftly
reconciled, and lived happily together as King and Queen of Sparta.

[37] Thou deep base of the world.]--These lines, as a piece of religious
speculation, were very famous in antiquity. And dramatically they are
most important. All through the play Hecuba is a woman of remarkable
intellectual power and of fearless thought. She does not definitely deny
the existence of the Olympian gods, like some characters in Euripides,
but she treats them as beings that have betrayed her, and whose name she
scarcely deigns to speak. It is the very godlessness of Hecuba's
fortitude that makes it so terrible and, properly regarded, so noble.
(Cf. p. 35 "Why call on things so weak?" and p. 74 "They know, they
know....") Such Gods were as a matter of fact the moral inferiors of
good men, and Euripides will never blind his eyes to their inferiority.
And as soon as people see that their god is bad, they tend to cease
believing in his existence at all. (Hecuba's answer to Helen is not
inconsistent with this, it is only less characteristic.)

Behind this Olympian system, however, there is a possibility of some
real Providence or impersonal Governance of the world, to which here,
for a moment, Hecuba makes a passionate approach. If there is _any_
explanation, _any_ justice, even in the form of mere punishment of the
wicked, she will be content and give worship! But it seems that there is
not. Then at last there remains--what most but not all modern
freethinkers would probably have begun to doubt at the very
beginning--the world of the departed, the spirits of the dead, who are
true, and in their dim way love her still (p. 71 "Thy father far away
shall comfort t