Public-domain ebook
by Euripides
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In: Plays/Films/Dramas·Classics of Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #35171.
The Trojan Women is Euripides’ stark, anti‑heroic tragedy that opens on a ruined battlefield just after the fall of Troy. The play’s first moments are dominated by the gods Poseidon and Athena, who converse in a dim dawn as the shattered walls of the city loom behind them. Their dialogue frames the human drama that follows: Hecuba, the dethroned queen, awakens amid the wreckage, her grief and bewildered rage echoing the desolation of the conquered women. From this opening, the drama narrows its focus to the captive Trojan women, Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen, who become the sole agents of a play that “has little plot, little construction,” and instead offers a gradual extinguishing of familiar lights of human life, a relentless meditation on loss, pity, and the moral cost of conquest.
Euripides writes in the lyrical, choral style of 5th‑century Athenian tragedy, employing poetic speeches, mythic allusion, and a chorus that voices collective sorrow. The language is dense and formal, yet the emotional intensity of the women’s laments pierces the formal structure. Readers who appreciate philosophical drama, the psychological depth of mythic figures, and the stark moral questioning that early Greek tragedy can provoke will find this work compelling. It appeals especially to those interested in the intersection of myth, politics, and the human consequences of war.
The opening · free to read
Judged by common standards, the Troädes is far from a perfect play; it is scarcely even a good play. It is an intense study of one great situation, with little plot, little construction, little or no relief or variety. The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a suggestion that in the utterness of night, when all fears of a possible worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory. But the situation itself has at least this dramatic value, that it is different from what it seems.
The consummation of a great conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans and thanksgivings, the very height of the day-dreams of unregenerate man--it seems to be a great joy, and it is in truth a great misery. It is conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men, after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.
Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull, but that it is too harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the due limits of tragic art. There are points to be pleaded against this criticism. The very beauty of the most fearful scenes, in spite of their fearfulness, is one; the quick comfort of the lyrics is another, falling like a spell of peace when the strain is too hard to bear (cf. p. 89). But the main defence is that, like many of the greatest works of art, the Troädes is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a bearing of witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks outside the regular ways of the artist.
For some time before the Troädes was produced, Athens, now entirely in the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which, though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the more humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the great crucial crime of the war. She had succeeded in compelling the neutral Dorian island of Mêlos to take up arms against her, and after a long siege had conquered the quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Mêlos fell in the autumn of 416 B.C. The Troädes was produced in the following spring. And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at sea for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Mêlos, flushed with conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege, was actually preparing to set sail for its fatal enterprise against Sicily.
Not, of course, that we have in the Troädes a case of political allusion. Far from it. Euripides does not mean Mêlos when he says Troy, nor mean Alcibiades' fleet when he speaks of Agamemnon's. But he writes under the influence of a year which to him, as to Thucydides, had been filled full of indignant pity and of dire foreboding. This tragedy is perhaps, in European literature, the first great expression of the spirit of pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle; a principle which has made the most precious, and possibly the most destructive, elements of innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of at least two great religions.
Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings not peace, but a sword.
So it was with Euripides. The Troädes itself has indeed almost no fierceness and singularly little thought of revenge. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music, as it were, and made beautiful by "the most tragic of the poets." But its author lived ever after in a deepening atmosphere of strife and even of hatred, down to the day when, "because almost all in Athens rejoiced at his suffering," he took his way to the remote valleys of Macedon to write the Bacchae and to die. G. M.
HECUBA, Queen of Troy, wife of Priam, mother of Hector and Paris. CASSANDRA, daughter of Hecuba, a prophetess. ANDROMACHE, wife of Hector, Prince of Troy. HELEN, wife of Menelaüs, King of Sparta; carried off by Paris, Prince of Troy.
TALTHYBIUS, Herald of the Greeks. MENELAUS, King of Sparta, and, together with his brother Agamemnon, General of the Greeks.
SOLDIERS ATTENDANT ON TALTHYBIUS AND MENELAUS. CHORUS OF CAPTIVE TROJAN WOMEN, YOUNG AND OLD, MAIDEN AND MARRIED.
The Troädes was first acted in the year 415 B.C. "_The first prize was won by Xenocles, whoever he may have been, with the four plays Oedipus, Lycaön, Bacchae and Athamas, a Satyr-play. The second by Euripides with the Alexander, Palamêdês, Troädes and Sisyphus, a Satyr-play._"--AELIAN, Varia Historia, ii. 8.
The scene represents a battlefield, a few days after the battle. At the back are the walls of Troy, partially ruined. In front of them, to right and left, are some huts, containing those of the Captive Women who have been specially set apart for the chief Greek leaders. At one side some dead bodies of armed men are visible. In front a tall woman with white hair is lying on the ground asleep.
It is the dusk of early dawn, before sunrise. The figure of the god POSEIDON is dimly seen before the walls.
POSEIDON.
Up from Aegean caverns, pool by pool Of blue salt sea, where feet most beautiful Of Nereïd maidens weave beneath the foam Their long sea-dances, I, their lord, am come, Poseidon of the Sea. 'Twas I whose power, With great Apollo, builded tower by tower These walls of Troy; and still my care doth stand True to the ancient People of my hand; Which now as smoke is perished, in the shock Of Argive spears. Down from Parnassus' rock The Greek Epeios came, of Phocian seed, And wrought by Pallas' mysteries a Steed Marvellous, big with arms; and through my wall It passed, a death-fraught image magical. The groves are empty and the sanctuaries Run red with blood. Unburied Priam lies By his own hearth, on God's high altar-stair, And Phrygian gold goes forth and raiment rare To the Argive ships; and weary soldiers roam Waiting the wind that blows at last for home, For wives and children, left long years away, Beyond the seed's tenth fullness and decay, To work this land's undoing. And for me, Since Argive Hera conquereth, and she Who wrought with Hera to the Phrygians' woe, Pallas, behold, I bow mine head and go Forth from great Ilion and mine altars old. When a still city lieth in the hold Of Desolation, all God's spirit there Is sick and turns from worship.--Hearken where The ancient River waileth with a voice Of many women, portioned by the choice Of war amid new lords, as the lots leap For Thessaly, or Argos, or the steep Of Theseus' Rock. And others yet there are, High women, chosen from the waste of war For the great kings, behind these portals hid; And with them that Laconian Tyndarid, Helen, like them a prisoner and a prize. And this unhappy one--would any eyes Gaze now on Hecuba? Here at the Gates She lies 'mid many tears for many fates Of wrong. One child beside Achilles' grave In secret slain, Polyxena the brave, Lies bleeding. Priam and his sons are gone; And, lo, Cassandra, she the Chosen One, Whom Lord Apollo spared to walk her way A swift and virgin spirit, on this day Lust hath her, and she goeth garlanded A bride of wrath to Agamemnon's bed.
[_He turns to go; and another divine Presence becomes visible in the dusk. It is the goddess_ PALLAS ATHENA.
O happy long ago, farewell, farewell, Ye shining towers and mine own citadel; Broken by Pallas, Child of God, or still Thy roots had held thee true.
PALLAS.
Is it the will Of God's high Brother, to whose hand is given Great power of old, and worship of all Heaven, To suffer speech from one whose enmities This day are cast aside?
POSEIDON.
His will it is: Kindred and long companionship withal, Most high Athena, are things magical.
PALLAS.
Blest be thy gentle mood!--Methinks I see A road of comfort here, for thee and me.
POSEIDON.
Thou hast some counsel of the Gods, or word Spoken of Zeus? Or is it tidings heard From some far Spirit?
PALLAS.
For this Ilion's sake, Whereon we tread, I seek thee, and would make My hand as thine.
POSEIDON.
Hath that old hate and deep Failed, where she lieth in her ashen sleep? Thou pitiest her?
PALLAS.
Speak first; wilt thou be one In heart with me and hand till all be done?
POSEIDON.
Yea; but lay bare thy heart. For this land's sake Thou comest, not for Hellas?
PALLAS.
I would make Mine ancient enemies laugh for joy, and bring On these Greek ships a bitter homecoming.
POSEIDON.
Swift is thy spirit's path, and strange withal, And hot thy love and hate, where'er they fall.
PALLAS.
A deadly wrong they did me, yea within Mine holy place: thou knowest?
POSEIDON.
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