Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Imagine an elevator-pitch along these lines:

The Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in the car crash in the Paris underpass was not the real Diana Spencer, but a clone manufactured in a secret facility with the connivance of rogue elements in British Secret Intelligence. The real Diana Spencer lives on, seeing out her twilight years in a retreat on Goa.

Who knows? Perhaps – despite (or perhaps because of) its bad taste – this idea is in production as a Netflix series even as I write, or perhaps there are corners of the internet where it’s believed as the truth: it certainly satisfies our taste for believing that we cannot believe everything that we are told to believe, that behind everything there is a hidden story – that even reality itself might be a simulation, an illusion created within some meta-reality. . .

It’s tempting to think that this kind of speculative What If narrative is a peculiarly C21st, zeitgeisty thing: I thought so myself until recently. . .

Over recent weeks, for peculiar and personal reasons, I’ve been working my way through the works of Euripides, the late C5th BC contemporary of Socrates who was the last and most popularly celebrated of the great triumvirate of Athenian tragedians (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Anyway, after wading through much blood and fine poetry, I came (in Volume 5 of the Loeb edition of his collected works) across something most unexpected: his play Helen, first produced in 412 BC.

The Helen in question is, of course, Helen of Troy – the face that launched a thousand ships (just as Diana launched a thousand magazine covers). In the familiar version of the myth, the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite engage in a beauty contest, with the Trojan prince Paris as judge. Aphrodite (goddess of love) wins, largely because she bribes Paris with prospect of union with Helen of Troy, wife of Menelaus and the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris collects Helen and takes her back to Troy and the rest is, as they say – well, if not history, at least legend and literature: a large proportion of classical Greek poetry and drama is connected in one way or another with the story of the Trojan war and its aftermath.

In Helen, Euripides turns this whole story on its head in a very C21st way: it turns out that the Helen that Paris took off to Troy was not actually the real Helen, but a Doppelgänger created by Hera (goddess of marital fidelity) to thwart the plans of her rival Aphrodite – the real Helen of Sparta has been spirited off to safety in Egypt. . .

Euripides opens his play with the real Helen in Egypt, pining for the day when her beloved husband Menelaus (who has been off in Troy for the last ten years, battling for the return of a phantom) will come and rescue her and take her back to Sparta. And come he does – the catch being that he has with him the Helen-clone. . . I won’t give any spoilers as to how all this pans out – suffice to say that, rather unusually for Greek tragedy, it ends happily for the main protagonists (and in many ways Helen is more of a comedy than a tragedy).

What’s striking is the way that Euripides’s Athenian audience seem to have entirely taken in their stride this pulling-of-the rug from beneath a central pillar of their own culture – indeed, according to the Introduction to the Loeb edition, traces of the same speculative-fiction premise can be found in surviving fragments of a poet dating to way back in the early C5th BC (“The tale is not true: you did not go on the well-benched ships and never reached the citadel of Troy”).

So, why on earth does any of this matter? Well, because an encounter such as coming across Euripides’s strange play helps puncture the bubble of presentism that we live in. So dazzled are we by the magic of modern technology (in a way that is psychologically perhaps not a million miles away from the way the Ancient Greeks were dazzled by the powers of the gods), that we are prone to imagine that our current world is without precedent, and hence that the past – especially the ancient past – has little or nothing to teach us.

One small symptom (though not small or insignificant for the young people whose education will be impoverished as a result) is the recent decision by the government here in the UK to withdraw the very modest funding for a scheme to introduce the teaching of classical languages in some state schools – so full access to this precious cultural heritage will continue to be the preserve of the wealthy with the privilege of private education. It’s enough to make one believe that there is some kind of conspiracy at work. . . I can feel the beginnings of a plot take shape – but it’s probably already been written by Euripides or Aristophanes.