Euripides: ‘The Trojan Women’

 The chorus in Euripides’s The Trojan Women is made up of women who are waiting to be allotted to the captors. They wonder whether they are facing a life of drudgery or of breeding children for enslavers.

Hecuba, the queen of the fallen city, must watch as the fate of her daughters is decided. Her sons are dead.

• Cassandra, the virgin-priestess of Apollo, is to be given to King Agamemnon and has lost her mind.

• Polyxena is fated to keep Achilles’ tomb. We learn later what that means: Her throat will be cut over the grave.

• Andromache, Hecuba’s daughter-in-law, is to be another “spear-wife.” Astuanax, her little boy by Hecuba’s son Hector, is to be murdered by the Greeks. Hecuba must bury the child.

In the middle of this cruelty, the Greek King Menelaus comes to claim Helen. He plans to take her back to Greece and execute her. Helen defends herself in something like a trial, with Hecuba prosecuting, blaming the lust of one woman for the catastrophic fall of a city and its people.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out that we receive news of each new cruelty from a herald. The cruelty comes not in dramatic fashion — with conflict between characters, between the oppressors and their victims — but by bureaucratic announcement. The cruelty arrives almost banally.

The prolog is crucial to understanding the play. It’s a dialog between Athena, once champion of the Greeks, and Poseidon, who loved the Trojans. Athena is sick of the Greeks’ hubris and asks Poseidon to whip up a storm to destroy the Greek fleet on its way home.

The men who are dealing out all this cruelty so casually are doomed.

This play is the third part of a trilogy. The first play, Alexandros, is about Hecuba’s son Paris, whose attachment to Helen brought the Greeks to Troy, seeking blood. When Paris (who was also called Alexander) was a baby, his parents were told he would destroy the Trojans if he were allowed to grow to manhood. They were expected to kill him but couldn’t quite do it. The second play, Palamedes, is about the wisest man among of Greeks and how he was tried and executed at the instigation of the second-wisest, Odysseus.

These two plays, now lost, explain what comes in the third: unrelenting cruelty. The Trojan Women is the account of the consequences.

Euripides’ trilogy placed second in 415 B.C.E., when the Athenians, once champions of humanity, were executing allies and neutral people in the Peloponnesian War. By this stage in the war, when the Athenians captured a city, they killed the men and enslaved the women and children.

Richmond Lattimore, in his introduction to the play, says the mystery is not that the trilogy placed second, but that the Athenians allowed Euripides to stage it.

The play has many wonders, including a tirade against the gods that is worthy of a lightning strike and a meditation on when a decision to die is better than a decision to live. This line, spoken by Hecuba, is famous:

 

Of all who walk in bliss

call not one happy yet, until the man is dead.

 

I like a duet between Hecuba and Andromache, where the women are correcting and finishing each other’s phrases:

 

H: O my children

A:        Once. No longer

H: Lost, lost, Troy our dominion

A:        unhappy

H: and my children

A:        Gone, alas!

H: They were mine

A:        Sorrows only.

 

I think of it as the “Death Rules Duet” of The Trojan Women, as memorable as the “Flower Duet” of Lakmé.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Trojan Women is on pp. 218-22.

The Trojan Women, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 123-75. The quotations are on p. 145 and 149-50.