A scene in Euripides

 In The Trojan Women, the chorus is made up of women who’ve been captured when their city fell. They are waiting to be assigned to the enslavers and wondering what fate holds for them. Will they be forced into drudgery? Will they be forced to have children by men they hate?

The opening scene, which says so much about the kind of suffering inflicted on women by men, was written by a man. It was written by a Greek about the sufferings the Greeks inflicted on others.

I tried to imagine an American version of that story, of a group of Africans, captured, waiting to board ships. And I tried to imagine which of America’s famous writers — I started with Hawthorne — might have written it.

I won’t say that reading Euripides is always a pleasure. But sometimes, in reading the literature of other cultures, you see what’s missing in your own.