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Hughes & Delahoyde
Orpheus
THE TROJAN WOMEN
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Euripides' play The Trojan Women, is not so much a tragic story as a portrayal
of a tragic situation whereby Euripides dramatizes the postwar conditions of these
women of Troy, the spoils of war.
The play was produced in 415 BCE shortly after the capture of
Melos by the
Athenians. We may wonder at Euripides' purpose for writing this play. One might
speculate on how such a play might be received by Athenian audiences in the wake
of the brutal colonization of Melos. Paul Roche, in the Signet Classic Euripides:
Ten Plays suggests that Euripides "wrote The Trojan Women as a prophecy
of tragedy to shock Athens to her senses" (359). A brief look at the playwright
may give us a clue about Euripides' intentions.
Euripides' plays are, for the most part, a departure from the orthodoxies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles. Euripides is often iconoclastic, dramatizing unconventional views,
especially by underscoring the plight of women and slaves; in the The Trojan
Women we see that the slave women possess a nobility of mind that stands in
striking contrast to the inhumanity of the victorious Greek warriors. In Euripides'
The Trojan Women, the Greek warriors' decision to murder Hector's son
Astyanax is coldly grotesque and motivated by an abstract fear that this child will,
someday, rise up to avenge his father, Hector breaker of horses (see the last
lines of The Iliad). In the postwar drama, these formerly fierce warriors
fear reprisal for their "work of war" and in this fear they commit an act of
infanticide. Andromache goes along with the vicious decree because she feels she
has no choice. The drama, ruthless in its depictions, slays the idea of hope as
a virtue. Hope is self-delusion and folly.
Of course it has been said that Sophocles, for his part, represents people as they
should be while Euripides represents people at their worst.
We can apply the
high mimetic/low mimetic headings to identify the different cultural
perspectives of Euripides and Sophocles. Sophocles' play Antigone and
Euripides' The Trojan Women both depict women struggling with powerful
and irrational patriarchal forces. Euripides gives us cynicism or skepticism
(even an antiwar ideology), aligned with Thucydides' disparaging sentiments
of human nature in his historical record of the Peloponnesian War. For Hecuba
and the Trojan Women, it is the Achaean warriors' irrefutable lack of compassion
-- the callous disregard for the lives of innocent women and children -- that
squanders humanity. For Sophocles' character Antigone, the potential for humanity
is squandered by the rigid postwar politics of King Creon, a man driven by the
poisonous power of victory without compassion. When we consider the noble acts
of Antigone, we are inspired by her loyalty to her family, despite the deadly
consequences. Sophocles focuses on the nobility of mind inherent in Antigone and
in doing so sets up a high mimetic rebellion completely absent in the subjugation
of the Trojan Women. Sophocles suggests that women can thwart the institutionalized
verdicts of superior and irrational masculine forces in non-malicious ways. Conversely,
Euripides' Hecuba remains a woeful woman in a postwar landscape of terror and
execution. She never considers the possibility of individual female rebellion against
corrupt yet superior male forces, although Cassandra may be said to do so. But it
is not Cassandra's nobility of mind that motivates her passionate and bereaved
actions. She is driven by vengeance,unlike Antigone.
Tragedy has a consistent structure in which scenes of dialogue (episodes) alternate
with choral songs (stasimon), which themselves may be but not always divided into
two parts, the Strophe and the Anitstrophe. Most dramas open with a Prologue as
monologue. In this play it is the speech of Poseidon. After the Prologue, usually
the chorus enters and offers the first of the choral songs called the Parados.
In The Trojan Women, Euripides inserts the first episode -- the dialogue between
Poseidon and Athena -- between the Prologue and the Parados. The last scene is called
the Exodos. Some tragedies have more or less episodes and stasimons.
The traditional structure of Greek plays looks something like this:
The Trojan Women
Prologue: opening monologue by Poseidon.
The Sanctuaries of the gods are splattered with blood. King Priam is dead.
The Trojan gold is being loaded into the Greek ships and the captive Trojan
women await their allotted fate. Poseidon says: "If you want to see misery at
its worst / look at the creature lying there, poor Hecuba."
Hecuba is King Priam's wife and Hector's mother, Queen of Troy. What has
happened to her daughter Polyxena? Does Hecuba know?
Questions on the Prologue:
First Episode
Why is Athena angry with the Greek army?
Hecuba's Parados:
Hecuba awakening. What is her condition?
Strophe I: Hecuba uses the image of ships to characterize her attitude or the
attitude she thinks or wishes she could muster. She begins here then by doing
some psychology on herself. Explain.
Antistrophe I: Sounds like Hamlet? Hecuba faces the deepest of grief. The
question implied is how to proceed in such a dire situation. How does one master
sorrow?
Strophe II: Hecuba fills us in on the past. This is common in all Parados -- we
get the history of what has occurred. Her anger is directed at Helen. Why not the
Greek warriors instead?
Antistrophe II: She is lamenting being old and a slave. She thinks of better days,
underscoring how war has taken her from riches to rags.
The historian Thucydides (a contemporary of Euripides) argues that "hope" is a
false or empty vessel. It is foolish and even dangerous. Under what circumstance
would hope be foolish or dangerous?
Cassandra is Hecuba's daughter and one of the most interesting women in Greek
Mythology. What is her curse? One may sense that Hecuba still hopes that
her daughter will somehow prevail against this horrific situation. Her inquiries
in Episode 2 begin not with the her own fate, but with the fate of her children.
The worst nightmare is to be forced to lie in the Greek bed. The chorus speculates
that perhaps some of the women will end up in the most beautiful of Greek cities
but we can see this as folly, or the twisted illusion of hope. We know that Poseidon
and Athena plan to annihilate many of the ships and thus many of these women will
drown before ever seeing the shores of Greece.
Second Episode
Enter Talthybuis, a herald of the Greek Army. This guy is almost comic in his
lack of understanding, a stuttering milksop whom the Trojan Women hardly fear
in contrast to Agamemnon and the other formidable warriors. He says they are
"personally assigned" each to a man. Hecuba chides him. Talthybuis doesn't even
get it, for he seems to think that the women should be honored by this lottery.
When Hecuba learns that her daughter is the prize of Agamemnon she says her
daughter is thrown away. Talthyybuis replies, "So it goes for nothing to share
the bed of a King? Hecuba does not answer this question. Why? What is the effect
of the long pause here?
Hecuba partially realizes what has happened to her youngest child, Polyxena.
Notice her composure at the news she receives, which is amazing. Perhaps because
it is presented to her as a riddle she can deny the truth. Yet when Andromache
tells her straight in Episode Four, Hecuba still maintains her stoicism. We
have the opening Parados to tell us that she has somehow resolved to "change
with the spirit of change." Does she have a choice? She asks: "What new law or
ritual, my friend, Among the Greeks is this?" What is the answer to her question?
Why are the Greeks reduced to such actions, actions that have even turned Athena
and Poseidon against them?
The son of Achilles, Neoptolemus (which means new war), gets Andromache. This
is a can of worms itself. Hecuba goes to Odysseus which is consistent in that of
all the warriors, Odysseus seems the least interested in young women as concubines.
His relationship with his wife Penelope endures for twenty years in Homer's
Odyssey.
First Stasimon: Chorus and Cassandra
What is Cassandra's plan?
Third Episode
Cassandra will be a lethal bride to Agamemnon. Cassandra should be seen in contrast
to the other Trojan Women, especially her mother Hecuba. Euripides is saying that
some women may have the power to stand up to the institutionalized power of the male
warrior class? Cassandra knows about the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon's own
daughter, so that he can acquire favorable winds to begin the siege against Troy.
She also knows of what she calls "obscenities" back in Argos (and other Greek cities
for that matter) that are taking place while these men, these Greek warriors, have
been ten years gone to war. In the Odyssey, it is the wife of Odysseus --
Penelope -- who stands in contrast to Clytemnestra and thus comes to represent
the good woman archetype defined primarily by sexual loyalty to her husband.
Cassandra's perspective is significant in many ways. See sees the Trojans as better
off. Why? And of course true to her curse, the leader of the Chorus calls Cassandra's
rantings "fiction." And of course Talthybuis is beside himself in bewilderment. He
says that he would not let Cassandra anywhere near his bed; thus the great Agamemnon
is not one whit superior to nonentities like himself. In this statement, Talthybius
is certainly correct, but he is still a lackey for he says this for all the wrong
reasons; he is entirely clueless about the real threat that Cassandra represents.
Cassandra's last seventeen lines are not just a prediction but an actual flash-forward
to real outcomes, which she affirms without fear.
Exit Talthybius and Cassandra.
Hecuba has collapsed to the ground. Her speech to the Chorus of Trojan Women
epitomizes the sense of absolute hopelessness brought on by extreme loss:
"count no one happy till he is dead." The "he" here is not Agamemnon, but the
generic pronoun that represents us all. Happiness resides not in life but in
death alone. Can things get worse? Remember that Hecuba has said to the women
in the Parados to expect it. The Fourth Episode reveals yet even more misery,
one disaster follows another.
Second Stasimon:
Enter Andromache, Hector's wife: Andromache and Hecuba share their collective
sorrow as lyric dialogue.
Fourth Episode
Who does Andromache call upon for help?
Andromache's long speech to Hecuba is fascinating and terrible at the same moment.
Hope again is seen as illusion.
ANDROMACHE: Mother, mother, listen, is a greater truth --
And now if I put away the image of my darling Hector
[Turning to HECUBA]
So I ask you:
Hecuba has never sailed on a ship. Yet she imagines the situation that sailors
face on stormy seas as an analogy for her dire situation. What is the point of
her analogy? Given the opening conversation and pact between Athena and Poseidon,
how does the analogy also work in reverse? How does it indicate the future of the
homeward bound army?
Enter Talthybius
Certainly Andromache's speech in the previous lines takes on a twisted new
pathological spin.
What news does the herald bring to Andromache?
Why do the Greek warriors decide to execute Astyanax?
Exit Andromache, Talthybius, and Astyanax
Third Stasimon: unjust fate. What is wanting now to our utter and immediate
ruin?
Poseidon seems to express remorse or at least nostalgia for Troy (also
known as Ilium, thus the name Iliad). He calls himself the Trojan Horse,
which perhaps is perplexing but also perhaps reflects Euripides' suspicion
that what really brought down the walls of Troy was an earthquake.
What is the dramatic purpose of the prologue?
What is Poseidon's sentiment toward the Trojan Women?
Why is he leaving?
Athena and Poseidon
What are her intentions?
What does Poseidon agree to do?
Euripides plays on the falsity of hope in a reality of despair. Hope it seems is a
useless, even bitter, thing.
What do we learn from the dialogue?
What suspicions does Hecuba have about her daughter Cassandra?
What does she suspect about her own fate?
What do the torches signify?
Describe Cassandra's character and her "gift."
What prediction does Cassandra make about Odysseus?
What is the grim plight of mothers in war?
What does Andromache tell Hecuba about Polyxena?
What does Andromache say about her death?
Are there things worse than death? What are they?
HECUBA: No, my child: sight and daylight not death. One is a nothingness,
the other hope.
if I can only touch your heart with it.
Never to have been born I count as death,
a death superior to a life of bitterness.
In death there is no pain, no awareness of struggle;
but one who falls from happiness to tragedy
is driven with regret and memories of blessedness.
In death it is as if Polyxena had never known the light
and nothing of her trials.
But I who aimed at happiness
hardly had attained it when it went.
All that a woman can contrive through a balanced life
I worked at under Hector's roof.
Even if a woman has no other mark against her,
one single flaw will bring her to notoriety,
which is, not keeping to the house.
So that was my priority:
to put such urges from me and stay at home.
I never allowed the frilly gossip of women
to infiltrate my house,
and kept to the steady counsels of my heart,
with quiet tongue and eyes serene before my spouse.
I knew when to rule my husband
and when to let him win:
a virtue the Achaeans came to know of
and it proved my downfall,
for when I was captured the son of Achilles claimed me for his own,
I shall be a slave in the house of my husband's murderers.
and open my heart to a new man
it will seem like disloyalty to the dead,
but if I turn from this new lord
I'll only earn his hate.
Yet they say that a single night in bed
suffices to end a woman's aversion to a man.
I, however, feel nothing but disgust
for the woman who forgets her former man
and beds down with a second.
Why even a dray-mare
separated from the horse she pulls with
shows repugnance for another partner in the yoke,
this in a mere animal of a lower order
without speech or reason,
whereas you, my dearest Hector, were my perfect mate:
noble, intelligent, rich, brave -- a man great in every way.
You took me chaste from my father's house
and you were the first to enter my bed.
But now you are no more
I am about to board a ship for Greece,
a prisoner of war and a subservient slave.
isn't your loss of Polyxena, whom you mourn,
less harrowing than mine?
For me, not even those vestiges of hope common to mankind
are left, and I do not deceive myself
with the delusion, sweet though it be
of anything being right again.
Which Achaean chief proposes this course of action? Why?
How does Talthybius tell Andromache to behave in the face of this situation?
What will she gain?