Andromache

Andromache is a tragedy by Euripides; no ancient record gives the date of its first production. The prologue is spoken by Andromache, the widow of Troy’s greatest hero Hector, who is clinging to the shrine of Thetis in Thessaly as a suppliant (lines 1–55). She has been given as a prize of war to Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, and has borne him a son. In the meantime Neoptolemus has married Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus, who has no child and blames Andromache’s drugs for it. Now that Neoptolemus is away at Delphi, Hermione and her father Menelaus mean to kill Andromache and her child. Menelaus gets the boy into his power and uses him to draw Andromache from the altar, but just as the two are about to be killed, Peleus, the aged father of Achilles, arrives, frees them and shames Menelaus into leaving (lines 309–765). Hermione, left without her father’s protection, is afraid of her husband and tries to hang herself, but the nurse and the servants stop her. Then Orestes, who is on his way to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, arrives, and takes her away with him (lines 802–1008). A Messenger from Delphi announces that Neoptolemus has been killed in an ambush that Orestes arranged, and Peleus, grief-stricken, is comforted by the goddess Thetis, who appears above him and tells him what is to come for Andromache, her son and Peleus himself (lines 1047–1288).

Date and Historical Background

The date of the first production of Andromache is unknown. An ancient commentator’s note on line 445 says that the date cannot be found, because the play was not produced at Athens. The play’s hostility to Sparta, which is strongest in Andromache’s speech against the Spartans (lines 445–463) and in Peleus’ attack on Spartan women (lines 590–601), suits the years of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, but the text itself gives no date.

Characters and Setting

Characters

• Andromache, a Trojan princess, widow of Hector and now the concubine of Neoptolemus
• A Maid of Andromache
• Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen, wife of Neoptolemus
• Menelaus, king of Sparta, father of Hermione
• Andromache’s young Son by Neoptolemus, who is not named in the play (the name Molossus is given by Pausanias 1.11.1)
• Peleus, father of Achilles and grandfather of Neoptolemus
• A Nurse of Hermione
• Orestes, son of Agamemnon, cousin of Hermione
• A Messenger from Delphi
• Thetis, a sea goddess, once the wife of Peleus
• The Chorus of Phthian women

Setting

The scene is the shrine of Thetis, the Thetideion, in Thessaly, near the city of Pharsalus and the palace in which Neoptolemus lives (lines 16–22). Andromache has taken refuge at its altar, in front of the statue of the goddess (lines 43–44, 115).

Summary of Andromache

Prologue

Andromache begins by recalling her happy marriage to Hector and the fall of Troy: she saw her husband dead at the hands of Achilles, and her son Astyanax hurled from the towers of the city (lines 1–11). She herself was awarded as a prize to Neoptolemus, the “islander”, and came with him to Greece (lines 12–15). She now lives near Pharsalus, where Thetis once lived with Peleus, in a country that the Thessalians call the Thetideion in the goddess’ honour (lines 16–20). Neoptolemus lives in that house, and old Peleus allows him to rule Pharsalus (lines 21–23). There, she says, she bore a son to her master (lines 24–25). As long as her son was alive she hoped for some help in her troubles, but now Neoptolemus has married the Spartan Hermione and pushed Andromache aside, and Hermione treats her cruelly (lines 26–31). Hermione says that Andromache, with hidden drugs, has made her childless and hated by her husband, and that she herself wants to take over the house and drive Hermione out (lines 32–35). Andromache swears by Zeus that she did not take her master’s bed willingly (lines 36–38). Since she cannot persuade Hermione, who wants to kill her, and since Menelaus, who has come from Sparta, is helping his daughter, she has taken refuge at the shrine of Thetis, which Peleus and his descendants honour (lines 39–46). She has secretly sent her only son to another house (lines 47–48). His father is in Delphi, where he is giving satisfaction to Apollo for an earlier outburst, when he went to Pytho and demanded satisfaction from the god for his father’s death (lines 49–55).

A maid then arrives, afraid of being seen, with news (lines 56–63): Menelaus and Hermione are planning to kill the boy, and Menelaus has already left the house to look for him (lines 64–73). Andromache sees that she is lost and that Neoptolemus is still in Delphi (lines 74–78). She asks the maid to go to Peleus; the maid is frightened of Hermione, but agrees (lines 79–90). Left alone, Andromache sings of her misery: Paris brought not a marriage but a disaster to Troy when he brought Helen home; Hector was dragged behind the chariot of the son of Thetis, and she herself was led to the shore as a slave (lines 91–116).

Parodos (Entrance Song)

The Chorus of Phthian women enters. They have come, they say, to help her, although she is of Asian birth (lines 117–125). They counsel her to accept her situation and leave the seat of the Nereid, since there is no point in her wearing herself out in a struggle with her masters: “recognize that you are a slave in a foreign city, where you see none of your friends” (lines 126–140). They add that they themselves are sorry for her, but dare not show it for fear of Hermione (lines 141–146).

First Episode

Hermione arrives dressed in gold and fine robes, which she says came from her father Menelaus and Sparta, not from the house of Peleus, with large gifts that give her the right to speak freely (lines 147–153). Andromache, a slave and a woman taken by the spear, she says, wants to take over her house and drive her out; her husband hates her because of Andromache’s drugs, and her womb is barren because of her (lines 154–158). Women from the mainland, she says, are skilled in such things, but she will stop her; neither the house of the Nereid nor the altar and temple will protect her, and she must die (lines 159–162). If any god or man is willing to save her, she must at least abandon her former pride, fall on her knees, sweep the house and sprinkle water from golden vessels, and learn that she is no longer in Troy, with Hector and Priam and their gold, but in a Greek city (lines 163–169). It is madness, she says, for Andromache to sleep with the son of the man who killed her husband and to bear children to him. That is the way of the whole barbarian race: father and daughter, son and mother, sister and brother mix together, close kin murder one another, and no law prevents it (lines 170–176). She should not bring such practices to Greece, where no man holds the reins of two women at once (lines 177–180).

Andromache answers that she is afraid, for being a slave she is bound to lose the argument, and if she wins she will suffer for it (lines 186–191), but she does not mean to betray herself. She asks Hermione what argument persuaded her to push her out of a lawful marriage: is Sparta smaller than Troy, or is she, Andromache, free? Or does she, a young woman in the prime of her body, hope with her city and friends to take the house in her place and bear slave children of her own (lines 192–204)? Hermione’s husband does not hate her because of drugs, Andromache says, but because she is not a fit partner for him; it is character, not beauty, that pleases a husband, and Hermione is proud of Sparta and of her wealth, and considers Menelaus greater than Achilles (lines 205–212). A wife should put up with even a bad husband and not compete with him in pride (lines 213–214). Andromache herself, she says, helped Hector when Aphrodite led him astray, and even nursed his bastards at her breast, so that he would have no cause for bitterness (lines 222–225). Hermione should not try to outdo her mother in her wish for men, and should flee a bad mother’s ways (lines 229–231).

The Chorus tells Hermione to agree, but she answers that Andromache, who pretends to be modest, is not (lines 232–245). They quarrel again over Andromache’s refusal to leave the temple (lines 246–260): Hermione threatens her with fire, Andromache answers that the gods will know, and Hermione calls her a barbarian creature, saying that she has a bait that will make her leave her seat of her own accord before Neoptolemus returns (lines 261–268). Andromache says that she trusts in Neoptolemus, and that there is no remedy for a wicked woman, as there is for snakes and fire (lines 269–273).

In the first stasimon (lines 274–308) the Chorus sings of the judgement of Paris on Mount Ida, when Hermes brought the three goddesses to the herdsman, and of the strife over beauty that led to the ruin of Troy. They wish that his mother had destroyed him before he came to Ida, when Cassandra cried out at the laurel that the infant must be killed, since otherwise the city would be ruined, and that Andromache would never have been a slave.

Second Episode

Menelaus enters with the boy, whom he has found hidden in another house, away from the sight of his daughter (lines 309–313). If Andromache does not leave the altar and leave the place empty, the boy will be killed in her place; she must choose whether she herself or the boy is to die for the offence she has committed against him and his daughter (lines 314–318). Andromache answers him in a long speech: glory has swelled many insignificant men, and Menelaus, who conquered Troy, shows how poor he is, for he rages against a slave woman for what a daughter has said (lines 319–332). If Hermione kills her, the stain of murder will fall also on Menelaus, and Neoptolemus will not take the loss of his son lightly, but will turn Hermione out of the house (lines 333–351). If she really had drugged his daughter, she says, she would accept her punishment willingly and not cling to an altar (lines 355–360); what she fears in Menelaus is that, as at Troy, he is moved by a woman’s quarrel (lines 361–363). The Chorus remarks that she has spoken too boldly, as a woman to men (lines 364–365).

Menelaus answers that these are small matters, not worthy of his power or of Greece, and that what a man needs is always greater than the capture of Troy; he is his daughter’s ally, because for a woman the loss of her husband is the loss of her life (lines 366–373). So she must leave the sanctuary, and if she dies the boy will be spared, but if she refuses, he will kill the boy; one of the two must lose his life (lines 380–383). Andromache cries that he has set her a bitter choice: she is unhappy whether she wins or loses it (lines 384–386). She turns on Menelaus with the question what city she has betrayed, whom she has killed or what house she has burned, and she laments her fate, having seen Hector dragged behind a chariot and Ilium burned, and having been taken as a slave to Argive ships (lines 387–403). She decides to give herself up for the sake of the boy: she leaves the altar, offering her throat to be cut or her neck to be bound, and bids the child remember her and tell his father, with kisses and tears, what she has done (lines 404–420).

As soon as she is out of the shrine, Menelaus has her seized and bound, and reveals that he has deceived her: he has promised the boy’s death only to draw her away from the altar, and now her fate is settled, while the fate of the child will be decided by his daughter (lines 421–432). “I have been tricked”, Andromache says (line 435). Menelaus tells her to proclaim it to everyone, since he does not deny it (line 436). Andromache asks whether this is the wisdom of the Spartans by the Eurotas, and Menelaus answers that at Troy too one pays back those who have done harm (lines 437–438). When she asks whether he thinks the divine has no justice, he puts the matter off and says that he will kill her (lines 439–440), and he says that his daughter may kill the child if she wishes (lines 441–444). In a bitter outburst Andromache calls the Spartans the most hateful of mortals to all men, schemers who are lords of falsehood, inventors of evil, who think crooked thoughts in everything and succeed unjustly in Greece (lines 445–449). She turns on Menelaus: Hector’s spear often made a sailor of him instead of a soldier, and now that he appears as a fierce hoplite against a woman, he can kill her; she will not flatter him. He is great in Sparta, she says, and she was great in Troy, and if she now fares badly, he should not boast, for he might fare so himself (lines 453–463).

In the second stasimon (lines 464–493) the Chorus condemns the pairing of two wives in one house, and two rulers in one city, or two minds at the helm of a ship. Authority in a house or a city is stronger in one person. The Chorus recalls Helen, the Spartan wife of the general Menelaus, who “went through fire to another bed”, and says that Menelaus now kills the unhappy Trojan girl and her child because of a quarrel. A killing so godless and lawless, the Chorus says, will be followed by a reversal (lines 486–493).

Third Episode

The Chorus sees Andromache and her son before the house, condemned to death (lines 494–500). In a lament, mother and child each cry out: she is led off with her hands in bonds, and the boy says that he goes down with her “under her wing” and calls on the rulers of Phthia for help (lines 501–514). Menelaus tells them to go down to the dead, she by his vote and the boy by his daughter’s (lines 515–522). Andromache wishes that she had Hector’s spear on her side (lines 523–525), and tells her son to plead at the knees of their master (lines 526–536). Menelaus asks why they beg him like a sea rock or a wave, when he owes her nothing, and says she will go down to the dead for the sake of Troy (lines 537–544). At that moment Peleus enters.

Peleus asks them what is going on and tells Menelaus not to hurry to a killing without a trial (lines 547–558). Andromache pleads with him, falling at his knees, since she cannot touch his beard with her bound hands: she has been dragged from Thetis’ altar, without a trial and without waiting for the absent master, and the boy is to be killed with her (lines 559–576). Peleus orders the bonds to be taken from her, and Menelaus forbids it, saying that he has the greater authority over her (lines 577–580). Menelaus says that he took her captive at Troy, and Peleus answers that his grandson received her as a prize (lines 581–587). Peleus threatens him with his staff (lines 588–589), and turns on him with a long speech. How is Menelaus, he asks, to be counted among men, who lost his bed to a Phrygian and left his house unguarded, and yet claims to keep a modest wife at home, the worst of all women (lines 590–595)? Spartan girls leave their houses with young men, with bare thighs and loose robes, and share the races and wrestling-grounds, and it is no wonder that they do not become modest wives (lines 595–601). He must ask Helen, who left Menelaus’ house and ran off to another land with a young man. For her sake Menelaus gathered a large Greek army and led it to Troy, though he should have spat on her and left her there (lines 602–609). Many good men died; Peleus is one of the old men left without his sons, and sees in Menelaus a fellow murderer of Achilles (lines 610–615). He mocks Menelaus for returning from Troy with all his arms unscathed (lines 616–618), for having ordered his brother to kill his own daughter in order not to lose a wife (lines 624–626), and for dropping his sword on seeing Helen’s breast, and kissing the traitress like a fawning dog (lines 627–631). Then he came to Peleus’ house, took it while the master was away, and wants to kill a defenceless woman and a child who will one day make him weep (lines 632–638). Better, he says, to have a poor but honest son-in-law and friend than a rich and worthless one (lines 639–641).

The Chorus remarks that from a small beginning the tongue makes a great quarrel, which wise men avoid (lines 642–644). Menelaus asks what is to be said of the wisdom of old men like Peleus, who say shameful things of their own relatives for the sake of a barbarian woman, whom he should have driven beyond the Nile and the Phasis (lines 645–654). He recalls that Paris, who killed Achilles, was Hector’s brother, and Andromache is Hector’s wife (lines 655–659); if his daughter has no child and Andromache’s children rule Phthia, Greeks will be ruled by barbarians (lines 660–667). If Peleus had given a daughter to a citizen who treated her like this, he asks, would he sit silent (lines 668–671)? Helen, he says, suffered by the will of the gods and her trouble helped Greece greatly, for through the war the Greeks learned the arts of battle (lines 680–684); to spare his wife when he saw her was prudent, and he reminds Peleus that he did not wish to kill him over the death of Phocus (lines 685–687). The Chorus asks them both to stop (lines 691–692), but Peleus answers with a speech on the way in which an army’s success is credited to its general alone, and warns that Menelaus will find Peleus no less an enemy than Paris was, unless he and his childless daughter leave the house at once (lines 693–712).

Peleus tells the servants to keep away, loosens the straps from Andromache’s hands himself, and takes the boy in his arms, promising to bring him up in Phthia as an enemy of Menelaus (lines 715–726). Menelaus says that, having come to Phthia, he will neither do anything base by force nor suffer it; but he cannot stay long, for he has to leave for a city not far from Sparta, once friendly and now hostile, to march against it (lines 729–736). When he has settled this, he will come back and discuss the matter with his son-in-law, and if Neoptolemus punishes Andromache and behaves with moderation, he will meet moderation (lines 737–743). To Peleus he says that he pays no attention to his words, which are like a shadow with a voice (lines 744–746). Peleus leads Andromache and the boy away from the shrine (lines 747–749), and Andromache thanks him but fears that Menelaus’ men will seize her on the road; Peleus answers that no one will touch her: he commands many horsemen and hoplites in Phthia, and he is still upright, not as old as she thinks, and a brave old man is stronger than many young ones (lines 750–765). Andromache does not appear again after this.

In the third stasimon (lines 766–801) the Chorus prays for good birth and a good house, and for victory that brings no shame and no envy. It praises Peleus, who fought the Centaurs with the Lapiths, sailed through the Symplegades in the Argo, and took part in Heracles’ capture of Troy.

Fourth Episode

The Nurse of Hermione comes out of the palace with a new calamity (lines 802–803). Hermione, terrified of her husband and ashamed of her attempt to kill Andromache and the boy, wants to die: the servants have barely kept her from hanging herself and have taken the swords from her hands (lines 804–816). The Nurse asks the Chorus to go in and comfort her (lines 817–819). Hermione enters, tearing her hair and clothes, and calls for the sword and the rope; her father, she cries, has left her “alone like a ship with no oar on the shore” (lines 825–858), and she wishes to be a dark-winged bird or the first ship through the Cyanean rocks (lines 861–865). The Nurse tries to calm her: her husband will not throw away a marriage into a rich and prosperous city on the word of a barbarian woman, and her father will not abandon her (lines 866–878).

At that moment Orestes arrives, who has come, he says, on his way to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, to see how his kinswoman, Hermione, is (lines 879–890). She throws herself at his knees, asks for his pity, and says that her troubles come partly from herself, partly from her husband, and partly from a god (lines 891–903). She tells him that her husband has taken Hector’s captive wife as a second bed, that she tried to kill Andromache and her bastard son, and that old Peleus has prevented it (lines 904–918). She has been led astray, she says, by evil women who visited her and told her not to put up with a slave in her husband’s bed (lines 929–938), and she warns that no sensible man should let women visit his wife (lines 943–953). She begs Orestes to take her away from this land, or to her father’s house, before her husband comes back from Apollo’s oracle and kills her (lines 919–928).

Orestes replies that he has come precisely because he knew of the quarrel in the house, and that he waited to see whether she would stay or be frightened away (lines 957–965). She had been his before, he says: her father Menelaus had promised her to him before the war, and then promised her to the man who sacked Troy; Neoptolemus insulted him by reproaching him with his mother’s murder and the Furies, and he was forced to leave without his bride (lines 966–981). Now he will take her from the house and give her back to her father (lines 982–986). Hermione says her father will decide on her marriage, and begs him to go quickly, before her husband or Peleus come (lines 987–992). Orestes bids her not to fear Neoptolemus, for he has laid a trap for him which will be known at Delphi when it is accomplished (lines 993–1001), and he says that Neoptolemus will pay for demanding satisfaction from Apollo for his father’s death (lines 1002–1006).

As the two leave, in the fourth stasimon the Chorus addresses Apollo, who built the walls of Troy, and Poseidon, and asks why they abandoned the city to the war god and let the Greeks destroy it (lines 1009–1026). It remembers how Agamemnon was killed by his wife, who in turn died at the hands of her children by the command of the god; “O Phoebus, how am I to believe it?” (lines 1027–1036). Many Greek wives left their homes for other men, and the whole of Greece suffered a plague (lines 1037–1046).

Exodos (Exit Song)

Peleus returns, having heard an unclear rumour that Hermione has left the house, and asks the Phthian women whether it is true (lines 1047–1052). The Chorus confirms it, and says that she fled in fear of her husband and of Andromache’s death, with the son of Agamemnon, who also means to bring death to Peleus’ grandson in the sacred precinct of Apollo in Delphi (lines 1053–1065). Peleus asks that someone go to Delphi at once and warn Neoptolemus (lines 1066–1069), when a Messenger enters and announces that Peleus has no grandson any more; he has been cut down by the swords of the Delphians and a Mycenaean stranger (lines 1070–1075). Peleus collapses, and is held up by the Chorus (lines 1076–1084).

The Messenger describes how, after three days at Delphi, the people of the place began to gather in groups, and Orestes went through the city whispering that Neoptolemus had come, as before, to plunder the god’s treasure (lines 1085–1095). The magistrates posted guards; Neoptolemus, unaware, went to the altar with the sheep, and told the Pythian priests that he came to give satisfaction to Apollo for his earlier demand for satisfaction for his father’s death (lines 1096–1108). While he stood praying at the altar, armed men hidden behind laurels, with Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra, among them as the schemer, attacked him, unarmed, in secret (lines 1109–1119). He took the arms hanging in the temple and stood at the altar, looking like a fierce hoplite, and demanded to know why they were killing a man who had come on a pious errand (lines 1120–1126). No one answered; they threw stones, arrows and javelins at him from all sides, and he warded them off with his shield, until at last he leapt from the altar and drove them back like doves before a hawk (lines 1127–1141). A terrible voice from the inner shrine rallied his enemies, and he was struck in the side by a Delphian sword and fell, and everyone struck at him with iron and stones (lines 1142–1155). They threw his body out of the temple, and the Messenger’s party carried it away to Peleus (lines 1156–1160). The Messenger says that Apollo, who prophesies for others and judges the right for all men, has treated the son of Achilles, who came to give satisfaction, like a bad man remembering old quarrels (lines 1161–1165).

The body is brought in on a bier (lines 1166–1172). Peleus, in lament, cries that he has no family and no children left in his house, and wishes that Neoptolemus had been killed at Troy (lines 1173–1185). He curses the marriage with Hermione that has destroyed the house, says that his grandson should never have brought blame on Phoebus for his father’s death (lines 1186–1196), and cries that the god has taken away both his son and his grandson (lines 1203–1213). At the end of his lament he calls on Thetis to see him fall to the ground, and the Chorus can only agree that the marriage the gods once blessed has brought him nothing (lines 1214–1225).

The Chorus then sees a divine figure moving in the bright air towards the plains of Phthia (lines 1226–1230). It is Thetis, who has left the house of Nereus, in thanks for their earlier marriage (lines 1231–1232). She tells him not to grieve too much, for she too lost her swift-footed son (lines 1233–1237). He is to take the body of Neoptolemus to Delphi and bury it there, as a reproach to the Delphians, so that his tomb shall tell of the violent death at the hand of Orestes (lines 1239–1242). Andromache is to settle in the land of the Molossians and marry Helenus, and her son, the only survivor of Aeacus’ line, will be the ancestor of a line of kings of Molossia, one after another, who will be prosperous (lines 1243–1252). Peleus himself will be made an immortal god, free from age, and will live with Thetis in the house of Nereus, and he will see his dearest Achilles living on the island of Leuke in the Black Sea (lines 1253–1262). First, he must bury Neoptolemus at Delphi and sit in the cave of Sepias until she comes for him with fifty Nereids (lines 1263–1269). He is not to mourn the dead, for all mortals must die (lines 1270–1272).

Peleus thanks her and says that he will obey (lines 1273–1278), adding that a man who is wise should marry the daughter of a good family and give his daughters to good men, and not desire a bad marriage, even for a large dowry (lines 1279–1283). The Chorus ends the play with the words: “The shapes of divine things are many, and the gods bring many things to pass beyond hope. What was expected did not happen, and for the unexpected a god found a way. Such was the end of this affair” (lines 1284–1288).

A Brief Analysis

Andromache is a play in which the central figure changes. Andromache is the focus of the prologue, the quarrel with Hermione (lines 147–273), the scene with Menelaus (lines 309–463) and the rescue by Peleus (lines 547–765), but her last words are spoken at line 756, and after Peleus takes her away she does not return. The scenes that follow centre on Hermione (lines 802–1008), who leaves with Orestes, and then on Peleus (lines 1047–1288), to whom the Messenger, the lament and the goddess are addressed. The thread that joins these scenes is Neoptolemus, who is absent throughout: his absence at Delphi creates the danger for Andromache and the fear in Hermione (lines 49–55, 804–810), and his death at Delphi leaves Peleus without an heir (lines 1070–1075, 1177–1178). The final scene reverses what the earlier ones threatened: the house of Peleus is to continue through Andromache’s son (lines 1243–1252), and Peleus is to be made a god (lines 1253–1258).

The play is also strongly critical of Sparta. Andromache calls the Spartans liars and schemers who prosper unjustly (lines 445–449). Peleus attacks Spartan women for their lack of modesty and Menelaus for his conduct at Troy (lines 590–631). Menelaus leaves for the military task he mentions, an expedition against a city near Sparta (lines 729–743), after Peleus has said that generals take the credit for the work of many (lines 693–705), and Menelaus dismisses Peleus’ words as a shadow with a voice (lines 745–746). Orestes, however, is not Spartan but the son of Agamemnon, and the Messenger calls him a Mycenaean (line 1075); his murder of Neoptolemus, and Apollo’s part in it, are criticised in the fourth stasimon and in the Messenger’s report (lines 1036, 1161–1165).

The second stasimon sets the quarrel of two women over one man (lines 464–470) beside the picture of two rulers in one city and two minds at the helm of a ship (lines 471–485). The play’s last words, which tell of a god who finds a way for the unexpected (lines 1284–1288), fit the way Thetis ends Peleus’ grief with promises that nobody on stage had foreseen.

Andromache Sources

Euripides, Andromache (lines 1–1288); Pausanias 1.11.1–2, for Molossus, Helenus and Andromache. An English translation of the play can be read on Perseus (Andromache).

See Also: Euripides, Neoptolemus, Menelaus, Andromache