Page 17 - GALIET EURIPIDES´MACARIA´S GIFTS: The Angel IV

Galiet & Galiet
“her brother’s sake and for herself [myself]” (532), we cry, we cry. It brings to memory all sacrifices: within this sacrifice, all sacrifices, spiritual and material, universal and particular are embodied. Moreover, we are moved because she is not willing to cast lots with her sisters, she sees this as her honour, her duty, her prerogative.
This firmness, this courage, is not to be tinted by her expectation to earn remembrance, gratitude or to be under the yoke of her lineage, her name; instead it is meant to touch, in us, a deep chord, in us, where each must remain silent within herself, within himself, the whole world silenced. Her sacrifice restores order, safety and provides security for her family and ensures victory for Athens. It ends the years of exile. It dwells on the priority of the communal versus the individual, of order versus chaos. Because it is voluntary, it contrasts to Iphigeneia’s, who is sacrificed, in one version, so that the Greek fleet may be blessed with favourable winds and sail from Aulis to Troy. But she, unlike Macaria, is deceived. Macaria perhaps knows it is best not to love life too much, to be too attached to it, implies cowardice. Her sacrifice helps in one way to reinforce the heroic code and in another, to question it. In this case, her courage does not demand hanging on to hope as posited by Amphitryon.10
We are shaken. Shaken. Macaria does not hesitate and does not doubt because there is no way out: if Athens falls, she is to be captured and to become enemy chattel only to be slaughtered afterwards; if she is not killed, she is doomed to a wretched and miserable existence knowing that her siblings are dead, knowing that she will not marry, not bear children because, as orphan, she will be an outcast. Thus, she, heroically, realistically chooses to bear the burden of responsibility for her family and for Demophon’s success over King Eurystheus.
10 Amphitryon believes that transience of human nature has a double-edge: to have the courage to die or to have the courage to hope. Hecabe (105). Euripides. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Hecuba. Ed. David Grene & Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.
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