Euripides' Trojan Women: Creation, Content, Context

Recommended reading:

For an affordable, modern translation, the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by James Morwood is a great place to start - and also contains the plays Hecuba and Andromache too. Both are available in our online bookshop in the UK and the States

Transcript:

Firstly, the name of the play is Troades, which means the Trojan women, it's Greek literally meaning women of Troy.

It's a tragedy. It was written by Euripides, so the last of the big three Athenian tragedians writing in the fifth century BC.

Its first performance was in 415 BCE at the City Dionysia Festival, so the most important of the drama festivals in Athens.

And as was normal, it was part of a tetralogy of three tragedies and then a saterplay.

I think that the link with the other tragedies that Euripides entered that year is really important and we'll be coming back to that in a little bit.

Now we do know that Euripides did not win with these plays. He came second to a writer that we know very little about named Xenocles and he won with his versions of the Bacchae and Oedipus stories.

Only three races qualified to compete each year and there were no prizes for runner-up, only winning mattered. So we can assume that Euripides would have been very disappointed at these results. And Xenocles's plays don't survive so we have no way of knowing how good they were.

and of Euripides plays that year, this is the only one where we have a fairly complete surviving script. So a fair comparison to see if Euripides did deserve to win just isn't possible.

Now, we can complain that an author that we're familiar with lost, or alternatively we can wonder if an author of whom we know nothing was pretty damn impressive also, and wish that his place had survived. So let's not assume that Xenocles didn't deserve to win, just because win... just because we're Euripides fans.

The structure of this play is a little unusual in that plot-wise not a lot happens. There's not even really what we would call a beginning, a middle and an end.

The setting is the immediate aftermath of the fall of Troy.

So the wooden horse full of Greeks has been brought through the city gates. The Greeks have finally managed to get inside the city walls. This is end game for the Trojan War and the Greeks have set about raising Troy to the ground.

And the play picks up the morning after the fighting has stopped, the surviving Greeks, at this point many Greek heroes like Achilles and Ajax the Greater, dead. The surviving Greeks have spent their time looting, pillaging temples. They are in a great mood.

They get to go home now, finally. Some of them have been stuck there for 10 years.

The play takes place in a makeshift camp of tents where the Trojans who have been captured by the Greeks are being held. And specifically this is the camp where the women of the Trojan royal family are being kept prisoner because every Trojan man has now been killed.

Apart from Aeneas, he's escaped. But that's a different episode.

And it being the Trojan War, we can't really forget the presence of the gods either,

and they are the first ones to speak.

The play opens with a speech by Poseidon.

For the benefit of the audience, he's recapping whereabouts in the story of the Trojan War that the play is starting with, i.e. the war is over, the city has fallen.

And he's abandoning Troy, the city that he helped to build, because there is nothing left of it.

Now the Iliad cares very deeply about its men. Euripides does something different here in this play.

Poseidon points out that Priam's widow, Queen Hecuba, catatonic in front of her tent, is almost frozen in grief.

In the last couple of days and weeks she has seen her son Hector die, she's seen her husband Priam die.

she has seen her city fall.

And Poseidon mentions that she's clearly devastated. She hasn't even been told yet that one of her daughters has just been sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. And what we have here is Poseidon expressing sympathy with a woman. And that's significant. It's fairly unusual. We might expect Hecuba, who is on stage during this monologue, to speak next.

but she's left in the corner of the stage alone weeping as Athena enters for a chat with Poseidon.

Now the Trojan War had caused a rift between the gods and they'd all chosen sides.

Poseidon had tried to protect Troy, so he's rather dejected. Athena, who's on the Greek side, should be really, happy. But instead we quickly find out she's furious.

It turns out she is not impressed at how the Greeks have conducted themselves in the last brief stage of the war. And she mentions a specific event that has really, really upset her. There's a Trojan princess named Cassandra, who is one of her priestesses.

As soon as the walls had been breached by the Greeks, Cassandra had run to the Temple of Athena.

where she tried to hide. And this was a common religious thing. If someone claims sanctuary in a temple, nobody is allowed to harm a hare on the head.

But there's a Greek named Ajax the Lesser and he's ignored this very sacred rule. He's entered the temple. He sexually assaulted Cassandra next to the altar.

Now this is sacrilege on multiple levels because it's not just a temple of Athena. Cassandra is a priestess

and priestess of Athena were virgins.

So no wonder Athena is furious.

Not only did Ajax do something despicable inside her temple...

He despoiled one of her virgin priestesses.

Athena isn't just taking this as an insult to Cassandra. She's taking this personally.

This is not how Athena, or to be fair anyone familiar with Greek martial etiquette, expected victors to behave.

other Greeks had been sacrilegious too. Achilles' son, Neoptolus, had murdered the Trojan king Priam at the altar of Zeus, where he had been claimed in sanctuary. So Zeus isn't happy either.

Athena approaches Poseidon and requests that they make up again now that the war is over.

and she asks Poseidon for a favour, which he knows he's going to grant because he's salty that his side lost.

She wants to punish the Greeks because they were acting like savages. So she asks Poseidon, god of the sea, to wreck their ships as they sail west, saying that Zeus is already on board with this plan and has agreed to make some thunderstorms as well. She wants Poseidon to make waves and whirlpools.

She says that she wants the shores of the islands in Greek mainland to be covered with washed up corpses of Greeks, so that everyone will be reminded that insulting gods has consequences.

Poseidon, upset that his favourite city is no more, is more than happy to oblige and promises to drown them with pleasure.

Now for the audience in Athens, they know that the Greeks are about to come into a world of pain. They know that Odysseus will take 10 years to arrive home and that the homecoming won't exactly go smoothly.

They know that Agamemnon returns home only to be murdered by his wife.

Diomedes returns home to a cheating wife, etc, etc. And they're the Greeks who survive the journey home.

Now the audience has seen all of those aftermaths treated elsewhere in literature and on that very stage even. So they know what's coming, but the Greek heroes are still oblivious.

So the gods, hatchets buried, depart and Hecuba is left on stage alone. And it's now that she speaks. She gives a devastating monologue describing how wretched her situation is, mourning her dead and worrying about what fate still has in store for the survivors. It's a classic lament.

and the latter half of it, because Greek tragedies were musicals, was sung.

So right off the bat, we're confronted with the huge trauma

of a widow who has lost so many citizens and her own children.

Now the other captured women of Troy start to join her on stage and they form the chorus.

This is an essential group of performers in the format of tragedy, who serve to communicate with characters, but also to provide a commentary on what's happening in the plot.

And here they remind the audience that it's not just Hecuba that's hurting, they have all lost family members, their homes and their freedom. It's bleak. They wonder aloud if they are going to be executed, or sold into slavery, or sexually assaulted.

there is for the conquered a lot of uncertainty.

At this point a Greek character steps on stage. He's a Greek man, he's a herald, his name is Talthybius. And he arrives to bring Hecuba up to speed.

He reports that her daughter Polyxena has been sacrificed.

Cassandra who has been raped, she can't stay a priestess,

So the Greek solution is for Agamemnon to take her back home to Mycenae as his concubine.

Andromache, who is Hector's widow and therefore Hecuba's daughter-in-law, will be dragged to Greece as well, as Neoptolemus is concubine.

Because raping one Trojan Princess isn't enough for that guy, he wants two.

And what of Hecuba herself? She will live, but she's going to be the sex slave of Odysseus.

How Thibius tells her all of this and he stays cool as a cucumber.

He's polite, he's not cruel, but he isn't sympathetic either. He's very matter of fact.

This is what happens after war. And the Greeks aren't about to break with tradition.

Meanwhile, Hecuba is barely holding it together and her emotional outbursts are in direct contrast to Talthybius being so coolly pragmatic.

And the victor and conquered dynamic is really stark here. Now that the war is over, Talthybiace and the Greeks, by extension, have nothing to worry about anymore. Although of course the audience knows that they absolutely should be worrying.

As far as Talthybius is concerned, Hecuba should be grateful that she gets to live, because a sex slave to a Greek prince or king is, in his opinion, a far better result than what the ordinary Trojan women in the chorus can hope for.

And as if they'd know that this is what he was thinking, it looks like the ordinary women have decided to set light to their tents in an act of mass suicide, avoiding what the Greeks have planned for them.

But it's not a mass funeral pyre after all.

It's Hecuba's daughter Cassandra, who enters holding the lit torches that any Greek would recognise as being part of a wedding celebration.

Now remember, Talthybius has just told us that Cassandra is being sent to Greece with Agamemnon.

So we might expect her to be as desolate as Hecuba, but she isn't. She's laughing, she's smiling, she's thrilled!

She throws off her priestly garments. She's no longer the virgin priestess. She's a bride.

Now Hecuba assumes as usual that Cassandra has lost her mind, that she's cracked.

But Cassandra says, no, I'm seeing everything so clearly. Let's not forget, Cassandra was never mad.

Before the war had ever started, she had been approached by Apollo, who was trying to seduce her by giving her the gift of prophecy. But she wanted to be a virgin priestess, right? And you can't do that if you've had sex. So she refuses to go to bed with him. And Apollo retaliates by ensuring that even though Cassandra would still be able to see the future, nobody she ever told would ever believe her.

And the people in the audience would have known from other poems and plays about the Trojan War that Cassandra had spent the entire time warning Paris, do not sail west, do not go to meet Helen, for instance, because the decision would kill them all.

But of course throughout the whole Trojan War, nobody listens to her.

Her whole family just assumes she's crazy, just as Hecuba is doing now. But Cassandra knows, just as the audience knows, that as soon as she gets to Mycenae with Agamemnon, his wife is going to kill him. And her.

She knows that she won't have to live as a sex slave for very long. She knows that her death will come soon and she will finally be freed of this curse. So she is genuinely celebrating because she knows her suffering will be over soon and she will be at peace. She even knows that the Greeks are about to suffer more than she ever will because of the angry gods. But of course Hecuba doesn't believe this either and she can't share in Cassandra's optimism.

She doesn't find any comfort in Cassandra's assurances that they're going to meet again soon.

As for Talthybius,

He mentions that Agamemnon has chosen the worst possible Trojan woman as his concubine, because clearly Cassandra is delulu.

So he hurries off towards the ships. Agamemnon doesn't want to be kept waiting. Cassandra, pathetically keen to hasten the end of her pain, enthusiastically follows him without any fuss.

Hecuba faints again. And this time she is helped up by the chorus, she sings another emotional lament. She has now lost all hope.

The chorus then sing their first stasimon, which signals the end of the scene, and they describe it as a funeral dirge that they're singing for their city.

The next scene then begins, but we're still in exactly the same place, the camp.

the next captive enters to be led away towards the ships. It's Hecuba's daughter-in-law Andromache, and with her, Hector's little son, Astyanax, who now that Priam, his grandfather, and Hector, his father, have been killed, is technically the next King of Troy.

Now again, the audience knows full well that this is an emotionally loaded appearance because they know how this story is going to end.

and in many Greek tragedies, knowing how it's going to end already is kind of the point.

Andromache is going to be forced to be the sex slave of the son of the man who killed her husband as she was forced to watch from the walls. And we can assume that she's well aware that Neoptolemus is particularly brutish, but at least she has her son who can remind her of her beloved Hector.

Packed up beside her is Hector's arms and armour.

which he was wearing only a few days ago.

As a woman, she is considered as much loot as her husband's belongings.

Andromache was once transported through the city in royal chariots, and now she's being loaded onto the back of a mule cart like luggage.

But she has her son. She hasn't lost everything. She still has a reason to live. She has hope. For now.

Andromache fills Hecuba in on Polyxena's death, sacrificed at Achilles' tomb.

And Andromache says that Polyxena is in many ways the lucky one amongst them, because she died before she could be raped, before she could be enslaved.

But then again Andromache is speaking as the mother of a living child. Hecuba has lost nearly all of her children already apart from Cassandra. And Andromache has literally just said that being a sex slave is a fate worse than death.

and Hecuba's just been told that she's going to go to Greece with Odysseus. So maybe it's not the most tactful, comforting comment that Andromache could have made.

Hecuba tells Andromache to take good care of Astyanax because he is still a child, but he is also a prince of Troy. And she hopes that he or his descendants will one day rebuild their city.

Now the audience knows that this isn't going to happen and they know exactly what Talthibius is going to say when he now steps back onto the stage. Talthybius regrets to inform Andromache that the Greeks have had a little conference and all have agreed that she can live, sure, but Astyanax cannot.

Odysseus, he says, convinced everyone. This kid is not harmless because one day he will grow up and seek his revenge on all of the Greeks. Too big of a risk, so best to kill him now while he's tiny and defenceless, he said.

Now this is Greek theatre. Violence is not shown on stage.

But for the audience, watching a small child being torn from the arms of his screaming mother might actually have been more impactful than seeing his real fate, Astyanax is to be thrown from the top of the city walls. Andromache's words are devastatingly poignant, and she wails that the Greeks are truly barbarians. Now bear in mind,

Euripides' audience here are Greek.

A devastated Andromache is then led away on one side of the stage, while her son is dragged away on the other.

Up to this point, Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache have all made a point to blame their fates firmly with Helen. They curse Helen as the architect of their pain and destruction. Menelaus, Helen's husband who started the war to bring her back home, now enters the stage.

He is in a great mood.

He says that he's going to punish his wife for her affair and for the war that it caused by taking her back to Greece where he's going to kill her. But Hecuba, who's been forced to live with the woman for the last 10 years, gives him a word of warning.

she pretty much says you absolutely should kill her but

If she should try and charm you and seduce you to save her own life, you must not fall for it.

Now, it's at this point that Helen is brought onto the stage and she and Hecuba have a debate.

there is nearly always a debate in tragedy.

In this one, Hecuba argues that Helen should be killed because Helen's uncontrolled lust has caused so much destruction. But Helen argues that she's an innocent pawn in a game played by the gods themselves. She can't be held accountable, she's a victim.

Which is, for people who know the story of the Apple of Discord, they know that's technically true.

but also Euripides has Hecuba make a further point.

Surely the gods wouldn't let all of this happen over a spat about who gets to give who an apple.

Hecuba says surely the gods aren't so petty so that must mean that Helen must be lying.

Now Hecuba is convinced that Menelaus isn't blinded by lust after all this time, that he won't fall for Helen's act. But of course we know that he will, and he does fall for it.

Helen bats her eyelashes and Menelaus forgives her.

and he doesn't just forgive her, he takes her back.

And so Hecuba, she has been robbed of her husband, her children, her city, her freedom. She is now robbed even of any semblance of revenge or justice or closure. Menelaus and Helen depart. Helen is the only woman to leave with her rank intact.

At this point the play is close to its end and all that is left for Hecuba to do is receive the mangled corpse of her tiny grandson, who the Greeks have at least allowed her to bury with traditional funeral rites.

With Astyanax's death, any hope for a Trojan resurgence is gone.

Talthybius, who has been given the task of dealing with all of these women, these emotional women, who he is increasingly beginning to see as victims of Greek violence, finally feels enough responsibility for Hecuba's suffering that he says he has even prepared the body for burial himself, sparing her having to see how broken the corpse was.

Amidst all of the endless humiliation, it is an unexpected act of mercy and kindness.

as Talthybius finally allows himself to view these women as victims of extreme trauma and abuse and not just baggage to be loaded into ships hulls.

He's not going to break the rules and set them free. He's not that sympathetic to their plight. But he does at least start to view them as people.

and perhaps even admit to himself that the Greek actions, though fairly normal and practical, standard in the aftermath of war, do have real consequences for the Trojans.

After the funeral the tiny body is taken away to be placed in a royal tomb. Talthybius orders the last remaining structures in the city to be torched and Hecuba, the last woman left with nothing left to lose, tries to run into the flames.

Talthybius snaps back into soldier mode, Agamemnon is waiting. There will be no escape for Hecuba. No mercy from a Greek.

She is forcibly led away to the ships, screaming laments as she is dragged off stage as we hear the sounds of the walls finally fall in the distance. And that's how the play ends.

So the play doesn't follow the typical structure of different events happening in various scenes. It's almost what I suppose we'd call now a bottle episode. One set, one location, our main protagonist is on stage the entire time, with events covering a tiny, tiny portion of the Trojan War story.

No wonder that some scholars and critics have described it as less of a play and more of a series of vignettes that get bleaker and bleaker as they go on.

Some say that the is little more than a list of women, one by one, being sad and explaining why their fate is dreadful, and then it ends.

and that they're not surprised that this play didn't win if it's just a series of miserable speeches. If it's just a series of miserable speeches.

What more scholars and critics have agreed on is that the play is obviously anti-war.

Multiple modern productions of the Trojan women are staged and advertised as it being a, if not the first, anti-war play. But is it?

Time to talk historical context.

The City Dionysia is held in March, the year is 415, and Athens in March 415 BC is in quite a positive position.

Athens is in a truce with Sparta, a truce that has ended the first Peloponnesian War, and though Athens hadn't gotten everything that they were promised in the peace treaty, they still control the sea with their unmatched navy. They still have an empire of Greek cities that they are extorting tribute and troops from. And they're sitting pretty.

Though they smart enough to leave Sparta alone, the Athenians were just as ambitious, imperialistic, bellicose and frankly greedy as they had been for decades.

A recent plea for help from some friendly towns in Sicily gave the Athenians exactly what they had been craving. Justification for an adventure.

So in the summer, they planned to launch an expedition to Sicily where they could all enjoy a good fight or two, loot the island for all the treasure it was worth, and who knows, add some cities to their empire maybe. And they rationalized that their Sicilian friends had invited them specifically to protect them from nasty Syracuse.

So the Athenians wouldn't be invaders, they would be saviours. They were obliged to help.

It was their duty to help. And well, if they benefited from it, it was only because they deserved a reward for their assistance.

So as I say, the play was performed at the city Dionysia in March. The Sicilian expedition would leave in June.

So we're seeing Athens at a time of ebullient preparation. They're optimistic, they're excited, they're really, really confident apart from a few people urging caution. So with this play is Euripides trying to talk them out of it by putting on an anti-war play just before they depart.

I'm going to urge caution here for the following reason.

People who have read Thucydides know that the Sicilian expedition will be an absolute bloodbath. The Athenians are going to get absolutely thrashed. But when this play is performed, Athenians had no reason to expect it to be a disaster. They had a massive navy, thousands of troops. They are feeling good.

We tend to expect or want Athenians at this point to be nervous because we know how this expedition ended. Thucydides certainly makes a point of telling us how much of a disaster it was, but he also makes a point of telling us that, save for a few voices of reason, Athens in the spring of 415 was feeling pretty bulletproof

and spoiling for a short fun war.

They wanted a battle. They wanted some pillaging. And as the Blackadder quote goes, back in time for tea and medals.

Why should Euripides feel the need to warn against a disaster that ⁓ he wasn't expecting?

Alternatively, it's been suggested that the play was not a warning, but a response to Athenian military actions in the previous year for 16.

The island of Melos had historical ties with Sparta, but nevertheless Mylos had remained neutral during the first Peloponnesian War. Athens, however, was hell-bent on hoovering up neutral Greek cities and forcing them to join the Athenian Empire, which had started out as a glorified protection racket, exploiting anxieties about more Persian invasions.

but was by this point, quite plainly, Athens as the schoolyard bully, beating up the little kids.

Athens had sailed to Melos demanding cash, and the Melians had refused. Maybe they hoped that Sparta would intervene, which didn't happen.

Now Athens didn't like being told no, so they laid siege to the city and after a few months killed every man of fighting age, took all of the women and children and sold them into slavery.

This act of violence is famous. The Melian Massacre. But not perhaps for what happened.

exploitation, massacres, that was all pretty par for the course in the Greece of the 5th century.

What makes this particular massacre famous is how one historian wrote about it.

Thucydides in his histories didn't just say Athenians wanted cash, Melos said no, Athens killed the Melians, which is what he usually did.

He chose instead to make a showpiece of this event. He imagines a debate between the Athenian commanders and the Melian citizens in which they both argue their case.

So instead of briefly mentioning this as an anecdote, it becomes a major scene in his vast histories. Like Hecuba and Helen arguing in the play, Thucydides turns that discussion into a script, and we call it the Melian dialogue.

The parallels are certainly there. Mealy and men are dead and the women are rounded up to be sent abroad as saves.

And in the Melian dialogue, the Athenians essentially say, you have no choice in this, this is what's going to happen.

This isn't a request, this is what happens to the losers in war.

And in the Melian dialogue, the Athenians have the upper hand.

they're not very sympathetic.

And they're essentially telling the Melians, you don't really have a choice.

Now, after this big emotional dialogue.

Thucydides does then describe the massacre and the aftermath itself briefly. And the parallels are certainly there with this play. The Melian men are all dead. The women are rounded up. They're about to be sent abroad as slaves. So was Euripides telling off his fellow Athenians? Was he urging them not to be so casually cruel and arrogant to face up to the fact that their imperialist policies had real human consequences?

Now, I have my doubts on this because I'm cynical, but these are my reasons.

Firstly, the Melian Massacre was not Athens' first massacre. It wouldn't be their last massacre.

Why would Euripides get his knickers in a twist about this one and not the others?

Also, the play was only performed a couple of months after the massacre. Did your repudies really have time to write and rehearse a play with such a tight turnaround?

particularly since all of his actors were, as was traditional for this festival, amateurs who needed intensive training.

Let's not forget he had to rehearse, he not only had to write but he had to rehearse four plays.

If the massacre happened in the late autumn of 416, would Euripides have time to write the play and rehearse it by March of 415?

Would Euripides be so brazen as to call out his fellow citizens to their faces so soon? We have to imagine that some of the people in the audience had been on Melos. They had been the ones to hold blades up to Melian throats. They had tied up, and I think we can assume taken advantage of, a million women.

Would Euripides want to be so blatant and public with his criticism on a decision that we must not forget was voted on by the majority of Athenian citizens? So my main issues with the idea that Euripides wrote this as a direct response to the Melian massacre are as follows.

As I say, the massacre was fairly run of the mill until Thucydides chose to make it such a standout event with literary flourishes.

And this is important. When Euripides staged this play, Thucydides hadn't even written the Melian dialogue yet. Euripides could not have read the Melian dialogue.

Thucydides didn't start writing his history of the Peloponnesian War until after the second half of the war, which happened after the Sicilian expedition, had ended. He started writing in or around 404 BCE.

We see the Melian Massacre as a main event in the 5th century, but only because Thucydides chose to concentrate on it. So why did he choose to concentrate on it?

Was Thucydides horrified by the massacre?

There's not a lot in his writing to suggest that he was.

So why does he choose to concentrate on it? Because it was an episode that conveniently illustrated Athenian greed, habitual violence and most importantly their arrogance. Mere months before that greed, violence and arrogance led them headfirst into disaster at Sicily. A disaster for which, let's not forget Euripides, had not happened yet.

Thucydides is writing with hindsight, Euripides is not. Thucydides didn't focus on the Melian massacre because it was an abomination, but because it provided a really convenient point for him to say, pride comes before a fall.

There is no reason, prior to the Sicilian expedition departing, to believe that Athenians paid much attention to what they had done on Milos.

They were an imperial power.

Subjugation even at spear point

was entirely normal.

So I think we can firmly dispute the assertion of many scholars that the Melian dialogue is reflected in the Trojan women. How can it have been? The Melian dialogue hadn't been written yet.

If anything, can we see the Trojan women reflected in the Melian dialogue? Thucydides does, after all, portray the Melians with a similar sensitivity to Euripides and the Trojan women. Both writers are giving voices to those who are typically unheard otherwise. But this is a moot point.

We cannot fall into the trap of looking at the Trojan Women in isolation. It was written as a trilogy of tragedies, intended to be performed as a trilogy, not a single play like we do now. Now, trilogies could cover chronological events using plays as episodes, or they could use three stories connected by a common theme.

And this trilogy, I would argue, does both. Trojan Women is, if you will, the finale of a trilogy that deals with the Trojan War in three stages. The Prelude, an episode at the beginning of the war, and then with the Trojan Women, the aftermath of the war. For the first two plays, we simply don't have complete scripts.

But because we have fragments and because they cover stories that we know from other literary versions, we can make a decent stab at reconstructing their plots.

We start with play number one, Alexandros. This play is named for Paris, Prince of Troy, who is also known as Alexander.

Crucially, we know that Hecuba was a main character in this first play. From the fragments we have, as well as other tellings of the story, we are told about what she has done.

When she was pregnant with Paris, she had a dream that she would give birth to a flaming torch that would burn Troy down to the ground.

The dream is declared to be a real prophecy. And Hecuba is urged to have the baby killed as soon as it's born in order to save the city. But she bottles it. She can't kill her baby. So she arranges it for... So she arranges that the baby be exposed instead.

Leave it in a forest or a hillside somewhere.

And that way...

If the baby dies, it technically isn't her fault. But if it survives and is found by someone, it can grow up far away from Troy and the prophecy won't come true.

The prologue of the first play reminds us that the baby Paris did not die. Paris was found and brought up by a goat herd in the countryside. Hecuba, all this time, has assumed that the baby is dead and has asked Priam for annual funeral games to mark his passing. We pick up at the start of the play, at the 20th or so iteration of these games,

when wouldn't you know a mere goat-herd son turns up to compete and ends up besting all of the aristocratic kids with his sheer awesomeness.

The main debate of the play, because all tragedies have at least one debate, seems to have been between Hecuba's two older sons, Hector and Deiphobus.

about whether they should kill this stranger on the spot for the audacity of beating Trojan princes in the games. Hector argues that murdering a goat-herd son is extreme. It seems from the fragments that Deiphobus convinces Hecuba that this new guy is a direct threat to her family. So she agrees to have him assassinated. It's just a goat-herd son after all.

At some point we also know that Cassandra, cursed to tell the future but never to be believed, arrives and instantly recognises Paris. She warns her family that he will lead to the fall of their city. Of course her entire family did the opposite of whatever Cassandra advised, so they ignore her and she is the only person who knows who he is.

The execution is arranged but Paris escapes. And like his father and sister will eventually also attempt, he claims sanctuary at an altar.

He claimed sanctuary as an altar.

His foster father arrives to reveal his true identity, and now that they know he is family, and because they always ignore Cassandra, the royal family of Troy welcome Paris back as a prodigal son.

which might seem like a happy ending,

but only for like the two Greeks in the audience who didn't know the story of the Trojan War.

The trilogy skips over the judgment of Paris, where he gives Aphrodite the apple in return for the most beautiful girl in the world, Helen, the gift that would start the war. Instead, Euripides switches to the Greek perspective.

The second play is about the cleverest Greek and it isn't about Odysseus. It's about a guy called Palamedes and his name is the name of the play.

Now Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, remember?

And there were a lot of men who were competing to become her husband.

When Menelaus won Helen's hand, he was already worried that someone would try and kidnap her. So all of the other suitors swore an oath to protect the marriage. Not only would they leave Helen alone, but if anyone else tried to come and kidnap her, all of the people who had competed to become her husband in the past

would set out with troops and start a war against whoever took her away.

Now Odysseus was one of those suitors.

But when Paris and Helen eloped and the call comes to mobilize, Odysseus doesn't want to go to war and he pretends to be insane to get out of it. Palamedes is sent to come and take Odysseus to war.

Now these are all events that happen before the play opens, but it's important to know the context.

Odysseus attempts to get out of going to Troy by claiming that he's insane.

which is as ridiculous as claiming that bone spurs prevent you from joining the Vietnam War.

So Odysseus is pretending he's crazy. Palamedes' job is to prove that Odysseus is of sound mind and has to join the war. Otherwise he's an oath breaker, which is the worst thing that you can be in Greek society.

And Palamedes, as I say, is a clever guy, so he comes up with a plan. Odysseus has a little baby boy. His name is Telemachus.

Odysseus, pretending to be crazy, claims that he is a farmer and is ploughing a field. So Palamedes takes Odysseus' baby boy, puts him on the ground in front of the plough and says, if you're crazy, carry on ploughing, go ahead.

But Odysseus, even though he doesn't want to go to war...

isn't about to crush his baby underneath some farm equipment.

At the last minute, Odysseus says, no, I'm not insane. Don't hurt my baby. Yes, I will go to war.

So let's think again about the first play and the second play. The first play is about Paris and his mother who can't kill him.

even though a prophecy has told her that by not killing him she faces disaster. The second play, we've got the character Odysseus who can't kill his son

Even though Odysseus is smart enough to know that going to war could kill him, he might be gone for a long time.

he still can't kill his son. We've got a Trojan and a Greek.

Neither of them can kill their baby son.

So successful, Palamedes takes Odysseus and they go to war. The actual play, Palamedes, starts after all of this has happened.

It starts just after the Trojan War has started, it's in its first couple of weeks.

and its theme is the run-up to the death of Palamedes. Emphasis in the play is placed on the ruthless cunning of Odysseus,

who prosecutes Palamedes on trumped up treason charges. Agamemnon, perhaps in collusion with Odysseus, orders that Palamedes be executed.

However, would be clear to anyone in the audience who knew the story about how Palamedes convinced Odysseus to go to war, they would know full well that this was not an execution, it was a murder.

So Odysseus is portrayed as ruthless, something which Euripides will return to in the Trojan women, the third play. Now there are some scholars that dispute any connection between the first play, Alexandros, the second play, Palamedes, and Trojan women within the trilogy, because Palamedes is not mentioned in the first or the final play.

However, I would argue the main characters in the first play would have no idea who Palamedes was. Why would they talk about him?

And in the third play, Palamedes has now been dead for nine, nine and a half years. Why would Persian women, who had still not met the guy, be talking about him in the third play either?

So just because Palamedes is only mentioned in the middle play doesn't mean that that play isn't connected with the one that went before it and the one that came after. I argue that there is a connection that runs the way all the way through. I argue that there are several connections that link all of them. We've already seen that both Hecuba and Odysseus have failed to kill their sons despite the fact

that killing their babies would have made their own lives easier.

And there's a second connection between the second and third plays. Odysseus, he's ruthless in the second and third plays.

He performs acts in both plays that strengthen Euripides' negative portrayal of his character, but mainly to show that he is a man who is decisive and who is willing to get his hands dirty and leave no loose ends behind him.

Now this is in direct contrast to Hecuba in the first play. She's failed to kill her baby son. She fails to kill him when she thinks he's just a goat herd with delusions of grandeur. She fails to kill Paris when Cassandra tries to tell her who he is and what he will cause. Her repeated failures allow the wheels of the Trojan War to be set in motion.

But Odysseus? He only hesitates once.

After that we hear about him killing Palamedes. ⁓ We hear about him killing Astyanax.

With Palamedes he eliminates a threat to his own reputation.

so that Palamedes can't reveal about how he tried to plead insanity.

And with Astyanax...

Odysseus, whether you agree with his argument or not,

He effectively prevents a second Trojan War, making sure that there will never be a sequel.

by ruthlessly ⁓ ensuring that no male Trojans survive to adulthood, even the toddlers.

because even a toddler can grow up to be a vengeful adult.

Now whether or not you agree with Odysseus' logic here, and to make it clear, I don't,

Euripides is portraying him as a force of sheer pragmatism.

and that pragmatism has succeeded where the emotional Hecuba failed. Odysseus was emotional in the first play

he's not going to make that mistake again.

From the moment he boards those ships for the war, is a strong, clear-headed man. Hecuba remains a weak woman, whose feminine maternal instincts prevent her from harming her son, even if it would save her city.

The Trojan women is, I guess, Hecuba being confronted with the consequences of her own inactions from the first play. And when we look at the trilogy that way, Trojan women doesn't even look particularly anti-war. It now looks like a warning about what could happen when you don't finish the job, when you don't tie up all the loose ends.

And when looked through that lens, killing the Melians now looks like a sensible act, a pragmatic act, because it means that they can't retaliate if they're all dead and enslaved. The Melians are Astyanax.

Now sure, we can note, as the third play does, that the defeated will be sad. But pragmatism does require cruelty. You just have to commit to it. At the same time, remembering that Athenian audiences knew that no Greek in that story, let alone Odysseus, got what could be called a happy ending,

Is the trilogy a reminder that violence harms everyone, victor and victim alike? And that if they want to succeed, Athenians needed to think hard about how much they were willing to corrode their own humanity by hurting others, if that was what was required to remain on top.

Euripides was a man who lived in and benefited from a society that glorified exploitation, suppression, imperialist violence, the glorification of warfare,

which had remained the knee-jerk reaction of all Greeks to any source of disagreement for centuries past.

If you're going to look to the ancient Greek world to find a pacifist, you're going to have to look long and hard to find one. They are needles in haystacks.

So Euripides, his Trojan trilogy, starts and ends with Hecuba. She fails to do what needs to be done from the very beginning. And ⁓ she ends up being enslaved by the one Greek who absolutely was willing to play dirty if it ensured his survival.

And perhaps that is the theme of the play. Any hesitation, any cowardice could lead to a spectacular downfall. You can't make an omelette without cracking some eggs.

If you want to stay on top, you've got to be ruthless. And Euripides could be argued to be using Hecuba as a cautionary tale to illustrate that point.

If Athens wanted to continue its existence as the centre of an empire, the hegemon of the Greek world, it needed to crack those eggs and not feel remorse about any broken shells. Because who knew? If Athens failed to perpetually reassert her dominance, who knew who might find the chink in her armour and bring about her downfall?

Was Melos Euripides' Troy? Or was an Athens that was at risk of growing soft and complacent Euripides' Troy? Is Trojan women an anti-war play? Or is it an anti-mercy play? Is it an early ancient version of the trolley problem?

Euripides portrays decisions alongside their consequences. He raises questions about which actions and which consequences are justifiable and acceptable.

As far as Odysseus was concerned, if he had shown mercy to Asteianax, Asteianax may well have grown up to lead the destruction of Greece, just as Hecuba's mercy to baby Paris ensured the downfall of Troy.

Violence and leniency can be equally as destructive as the other if the motive is emotional over logical.

Euripides prompts us to think about whether sympathy should be a factor in these critical decisions.

Should morality prevail or prudence?

Is it possible for extreme violence to be justifiable?

And is it still human? And is it still human to acknowledge that that violence will cause pain to the victims?

In 5th century Athens, the men watching this trilogy are the same men voting in the assembly, the same men who are taking all of these questions into account when they're making their decisions in a radical democracy.

Of course, if Euripides was advising them against merciful policies in the Sicilian expedition, that backfired.

In Sicily it was the Athenians who ended up begging for mercy, and the citizens of Syracuse who chose to withhold it. How the tables turn.

Now look, nobody will be able to interview Euripides about his writing, and like all art, his plays are open to individual interpretation. As we've seen, even the dominant interpretations often have a very valid, alternative argument that challenged that view. So what was Euripides trying to say, and what prompted him to say it? I don't think we'll ever come to a consensus, we're never going to really know for sure. To wrap up though,

I want to defend the Trojan women against the critics who say it's just a litany of woe, a queue of miserable women. Euripides was a maestro of emotion, and in this play, confined as it is to a single afternoon spent next to a tent, it is nevertheless a masterpiece of an emotional study. Now, of course, all plays were meant to be watched, not read.

and I cannot recommend enough finding a performance for yourself. Recordings of several modern productions in English are available on YouTube for instance, and it is always a deeply emotional experience to watch. One that proves that real tragedy, the depths of emotional despair, doesn't need elaborate sets or scenes.

Sometimes trauma is best understood when we simply sit with those affected. Let them speak of their experiences and emotions and really listen to and allow ourselves to empathise with what they have to say.

In the end, it's really a moot point whether Euripides wants us to take the misery of these women as a call for peace or as a cautionary tale. It's not up to an author how an audience responds and what conclusions they draw.

every single person in an audience is going to respond in their own way.

Which is why no historian is ever going to agree about what this play is really saying.

Either way though, this play is one of the very best examples of Euripides really delving into the psyche of his characters. And that's why this play remains worth reading and watching.

and watching even now.

And it's open for interpretation by directors and actors too, by the way.

I fully expect that over the next 10-20 years there's going to be a lot of productions of the Trojan women.

Set in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon.

and when there are I'm going to be buying tickets

Not because of what I think Euripides was trying to say about the 5th century.

but because atrocities are happening to women right now.

And if a revival of an ancient play is the only way they're going to get us to listen to them?

Well then, I already have tickets.

Front Row Center.

One last thing to try and prove my theory that depictions of grief can be devastating without a lot of bells and whistles. Check out the film Mass by Fran Krantz. Four main characters, one conversation, all taking place in one room in one afternoon.

It's about the bereaved parents of a teenager killed in a school shooting, who sit down to talk with the bereaved parents of the teenager who shot him. It's a quiet film, in much the same vein as Trojan Women is a quiet play.

But like Trojan women, the raw depiction of grief and the destruction of the lives of people left still alive is one that will stay with you for years after watching it.

I guess what you will take away from the Trojan women as a play

will depend on your own views.

About war.

about what is acceptable during war.

about how we treat the people that we call our enemies.

And if I leave you with one thing...

it's to note that

Athens was a militaristic society. It was an imperialist power.

And we're talking about a century where Athens was at war more often than they weren't.

They didn't have a Geneva Convention. They didn't have laws of armed conflict. They didn't have international humanitarian laws.

They didn't have their own version of the Nuremberg trials.

They didn't have their own version of the Hague.

They had their own rules, their own beliefs.

that are very often sharply contrasted with what we believe now.

And that can make it tough to understand a play from an ancient perspective.

We need to put ourselves in the shoes of an ancient Athenian.

whose experiences of war and their aftermath were very different from ours.

and who never had to see war crime after war crime after war crime pop up on their social media feeds like we have for the last couple of years.

In a way, I can't blame scholars for wanting to see this as an anti-war play.

And that's because of the time that I've grown up in, the country that I've grown up in.

the history books I've read

and the footage that I've seen on the news.

And if modern theatre companies want to carry on showing this play as an anti-war play, I certainly have no issues with that.

the horrors that can be inflicted upon civilians, non-combatants, women and children.

So I've given you an idea of what ancient people in the ancient theatre in ancient Athens would have thought about the play, the context about the writing of the play.

Two and a half millennia later...

We are absolutely free to interpret it the way we want to.

That's the joy of art.

That's the wonder of art.

why art will always be so important to us as humans.