Euripides’ “Trojan Women:” The Play’s Story and Background
The Trojan Women is a dark play of war and cruelty, and it is as pertinent today as it was when Euripides wrote it, about 2500 years ago.
The Trojan War provides the background of the play’s action; but the war to which Euripides alludes is, of course, the Peloponnesian war, the war between the Athenians and the Spartans, during which the play was composed and performed in ancient Athens.
In the winter of 416-415 B.C., a nominally peaceful year during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians had invited the neutral island of Melos to join their alliance. The Melians refused, and, in a show of power, the Athenians retaliated by besieging their capital, forcing the people to capitulate, putting to death all the men, and enslaving all women and children of the island.
During the following winter (415-414 B.C.), the Athenians, dangerously intoxicated by their own power and equally unprovoked by the Sicilians, decided to conquer the island of Sicily. Two years later (413 B.C.), this expedition ended disastrously for the Athenians, who never recovered completely from its devastation.
Between these two major events of Athenian history, in the summer of 415 B.C., Euripides presented on stage his Trojan Women. Using the archetype of the Trojan War, he artistically and powerfully evoked the hallucination of military and economic power, and he provided the world with an eternal and incomparable political commentary on the futility of war, which ruins equally both the victor and the vanquished. As Richmond Lattimore once observed, “during the earlier years of the (Peloponnesian) war Euripides wrote a number of ‘patriotic’ plays and may have believed or tried to force himself to believe in the rightness of the Periclean cause and the wickedness of the enemy. By 415 he had reason to conclude that, at least in the treatment of captives, neither side was better than the other.”
The Trojan Women is Euripides’ way of strongly depicting this stark reality, in which the Athenians could hopefully see themselves. When the play begins, the Trojan War is over. The Greeks, who have prevailed, have killed all the men of Troy, and they have captured the surviving women, whom they are preparing to ship to Greece as slaves.
Hecuba, the proud queen of Troy, is now crashed, and, together with the other captive women, laments the losses of the Trojans and the suffering, which is yet to come.
Talthybius, the Greek herald whose heart is touched by the misery of the prisoners, announces to the enslaved women the Greek master to whom each one of them has been assigned by lot; and the women lament their upcoming life of suffering, shame and slavery. Their heartbreaking fate is tragically juxtaposed with the cruel callousness of the Greek victors; and through their plight, Euripides exposes his audience to the brutal reality of war viewed from the unusual and unique perspective of the loser.
The play ends as Hecuba is trying to bury the body of her grandson, the tragic Astyanax, in a hurry, and the women of Troy mourn over the child’s unjust killing by the Greeks and over the disappearance of all of their hopes. Finally, as the women turn toward the Greek ships, the walls of Troy go up in flames and the Greeks get ready to embark on a gloomy and ominous journey back home.
Through all these, we can safely argue that although The Trojan Women deals, almost exclusively, with the evils and cruelty of war, the distress of the victims is not its only focus. For, here, as Albin Lesky once observed, Euripides showed clearly “how much he was concerned to proclaim the profound truth that the demon of war strikes the victor too with an even more frightful scourge.”
This, in turn, makes it particularly evident why few plays, ancient or modern, could be more pertinent to the grim reality of our conflicted world. For more than in any other of his plays, here, Euripides forces us to look closely at ourselves, he challenges us to re-examine our own values and beliefs, and he ruthlessly pushes us over the edge as he confronts us with the serious questioning of the meaning of power, civilization, sanity, truth, beauty, justice, freedom, and above all, the meaning of personal or public victory.
© Copyright 2009 Lena Hatzichronoglou Ph.D. www.hellenicvisions.com
The Trojan War provides the background of the play’s action; but the war to which Euripides alludes is, of course, the Peloponnesian war, the war between the Athenians and the Spartans, during which the play was composed and performed in ancient Athens.
In the winter of 416-415 B.C., a nominally peaceful year during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians had invited the neutral island of Melos to join their alliance. The Melians refused, and, in a show of power, the Athenians retaliated by besieging their capital, forcing the people to capitulate, putting to death all the men, and enslaving all women and children of the island.
During the following winter (415-414 B.C.), the Athenians, dangerously intoxicated by their own power and equally unprovoked by the Sicilians, decided to conquer the island of Sicily. Two years later (413 B.C.), this expedition ended disastrously for the Athenians, who never recovered completely from its devastation.
Between these two major events of Athenian history, in the summer of 415 B.C., Euripides presented on stage his Trojan Women. Using the archetype of the Trojan War, he artistically and powerfully evoked the hallucination of military and economic power, and he provided the world with an eternal and incomparable political commentary on the futility of war, which ruins equally both the victor and the vanquished. As Richmond Lattimore once observed, “during the earlier years of the (Peloponnesian) war Euripides wrote a number of ‘patriotic’ plays and may have believed or tried to force himself to believe in the rightness of the Periclean cause and the wickedness of the enemy. By 415 he had reason to conclude that, at least in the treatment of captives, neither side was better than the other.”
The Trojan Women is Euripides’ way of strongly depicting this stark reality, in which the Athenians could hopefully see themselves. When the play begins, the Trojan War is over. The Greeks, who have prevailed, have killed all the men of Troy, and they have captured the surviving women, whom they are preparing to ship to Greece as slaves.
Hecuba, the proud queen of Troy, is now crashed, and, together with the other captive women, laments the losses of the Trojans and the suffering, which is yet to come.
Talthybius, the Greek herald whose heart is touched by the misery of the prisoners, announces to the enslaved women the Greek master to whom each one of them has been assigned by lot; and the women lament their upcoming life of suffering, shame and slavery. Their heartbreaking fate is tragically juxtaposed with the cruel callousness of the Greek victors; and through their plight, Euripides exposes his audience to the brutal reality of war viewed from the unusual and unique perspective of the loser.
The play ends as Hecuba is trying to bury the body of her grandson, the tragic Astyanax, in a hurry, and the women of Troy mourn over the child’s unjust killing by the Greeks and over the disappearance of all of their hopes. Finally, as the women turn toward the Greek ships, the walls of Troy go up in flames and the Greeks get ready to embark on a gloomy and ominous journey back home.
Through all these, we can safely argue that although The Trojan Women deals, almost exclusively, with the evils and cruelty of war, the distress of the victims is not its only focus. For, here, as Albin Lesky once observed, Euripides showed clearly “how much he was concerned to proclaim the profound truth that the demon of war strikes the victor too with an even more frightful scourge.”
This, in turn, makes it particularly evident why few plays, ancient or modern, could be more pertinent to the grim reality of our conflicted world. For more than in any other of his plays, here, Euripides forces us to look closely at ourselves, he challenges us to re-examine our own values and beliefs, and he ruthlessly pushes us over the edge as he confronts us with the serious questioning of the meaning of power, civilization, sanity, truth, beauty, justice, freedom, and above all, the meaning of personal or public victory.
© Copyright 2009 Lena Hatzichronoglou Ph.D. www.hellenicvisions.com
