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hree quarters of the way into Helen, we come to a critical moment in the plot. We have just watched the scene where Helen and Menelaus persuade the Egyptian king Theoclymenus to give them a ship: the escape plan has been put into action, but its success is far from guaranteed. The Chorus’ response to this moment of suspense is strange: they sing an ode telling the story of Demeter’s search for Persephone, which is, furthermore, couched in the language of the orgiastic cult of the Great Mother (1301–68). At first glance, the Demeter ode seems deliberately irrelevant. The ode makes no overt reference to events onstage; the only link to Helen’s story comes in the final stanza. The text is corrupt, but someone (presumably Helen) is said to have incurred Demeter’s wrath by not honoring her rites (1355– 57).1 This statement itself is doubly perplexing, as we are given no indication of how or why, and it does not tie in with anything we know of the Helen myth. The choice of myth is also surprising: there seems no reason to use Demeter’s story as a paradigm for Helen’s and no reason to link Demeter’s search to Helen’s escape. Scholars have traditionally explained away the ode as a piece of lyric poetry in its own right.2 It was seen as typical of Euripides and of the increasing

How to Make a Goddess Angry: Making Sense of the Demeter Ode in Euripides’Helen