Greek Drama · Part 10 · Euripides · B2
Euripides: The Trojan Women
Part 10 of Greek Drama: Troy has fallen. Its men are dead, and its women wait on the shore to be shared out among the Greek victors as slaves: old Queen Hecuba, the prophetess Cassandra, Hector’s widow Andromache and her little son. Euripides staged this play in Athens a few months after Athens itself had destroyed the island of Melos. The passive in many tenses (has been destroyed, will be taken, are being shared out), and the language of war, loss and refugees, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria. The play includes the death of a child, told briefly.
In the Iliad, you saw the war from the battlefield, through the eyes of heroes. Tonight, Euripides shows us the end of the war through the eyes of the people who are always left behind: the women. Troy is burning, and they are waiting to learn which Greek they will belong to.
The battle is over, Marcos. This is what comes after. And it was written at a terrible moment: a few months before, the Athenians themselves had killed all the men of the island of Melos and sold its women and children as slaves. The audience watching this play were the Greeks. Tonight we use the passive, the grammar of what is done to people.
The shore of Troy, the morning after the city fell
In 416 BCE, the small island of Melos refused to join the Athenian empire. The historian Thucydides records the Athenians’ cold argument, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” After a siege, the Athenians killed the men of Melos and enslaved the women and children. In the spring of 415 BCE, Euripides presented The Trojan Women at the City Dionysia. Scholars debate how far it was meant as a comment on Melos, but few…
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