Page 25 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

who swore party oaths, also conform and obey. The wise elders make no attempt to timely revolt, or to emancipate Trojans to oust King Priam from his tyrannical throne, or to conspire to return Helen to the Argive ships to save Troy. They wisely counsel but miss to act. They prudently argue from reason, but do not persist to defend their postures. They clearly apprehend Helen’s fatal threat, they speak, but their words act little. Yet, unlike Priam, they argue from reason, not fate, and not from Paris’ mouth. To King Priam, the Trojan War is a necessary war; to the elders, however, it is a contingent war. The wise elders rightly fear a Trojan tango with Helen’s Beauty and Death, just as the Jews of Celan’s Auschwitz epic fear their dance with Margareta’s Beauty and Death. Not only are “Trojans in the wrong,” says Edwards, “in weakly agreeing to the continuing presence of Helen and the property Paris seized with her,” but also, they are “responsible for the breaking of the truce in Book 4.”40
Long before divine will elects its victor and loser, King Priam has risked Troy’s demise by blindly seconding Paris’ despotic lunacy. When King Priam commands war to ensue soon after burials, “the terms of death” certainly “hang over the Trojans.”41 If Death is a Master from Deutschland during Nazi Germany, then Death is Master from both Argos and Troy itself. By conceding to keep beautiful Helen, and to abide by divine fate, King Priam nonetheless wills. He perniciously wills and, hence risks, Troy’s self-destruction. As war evolves, no
40 Edwards. Homer: Poet of the Iliad. London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987. 155.
41 Il.,7.402.
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