Summary
Prologue
Poseidon is on the walls of Troy, looking down. The walls are now smoldering. The women who have not been killed but are reserved for the victorious Greek commanders are in tents in the foreground of the walls. Hecuba, the former Queen of Troy, writhes on the ground in despair.
Poseidon announces that he has left the depths of the Aegean Sea to return to these walls. He and Apollo built these stone towers, but now the city has been destroyed by the Argives. This happened when Epeios of Phokis built a wooden horse filled with soldiers and sent it to the walls. The sacred groves of the gods are now empty and their temples “drip with blood” (36). King Priam has fallen at the alter of Zeus of the Enclosure. Gold and other treasures are being taken to the ships of the Achaeans, who are waiting for a wind to finally take them back to their wives and children.
Poseidon says that he, too, is leaving, for Hera and Athena, who combined to destroy the Phrygians, have defeated him. When a city is ruined, the gods’ world sickens as well.
The women of Troy have new masters, and those who have not yet been distributed sit below him. They are reserved for the great men of the army, and include Helen and the wretched Hecuba (to whom he points). Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena was put to death at Achilles’ grave, though she does not know it yet, and her other daughter, a virgin, was given to Agamemnon.
Athena appears on the walls, asking to speak to Poseidon and to abandon their enmity. Poseidon consents and Athena thanks him, explaining that she has matters that concern them both. She states that she comes on behalf of Troy, which confuses Poseidon, who asks if she has abandoned her hatred of the city.
Athena motions him closer and he asks what she has in mind: has she come on behalf of the Achaeans or the Phrygians? She replies that she wants to cheer her former enemies, the Trojans, and give the Achaean army a bitter homecoming. Poseidon asks how she can vacillate so wildly, and she explains that her temple was blasphemed when Ajax raped Kassandra on the steps and no one did anything to prevent it. Poseidon admits that he knows of this. She wants to do them harm now, and Poseidon agrees to help.
Athena explains her plan: when they have left Ilion for home, Zeus will pour down rain and hail from heaven on the returning forces. There will be lightning to burn their ships. Poseidon should make the sea roar with waves and white caps and fill the sea with corpses. The Achaeans need to know to respect her palaces.
Poseidon consents to the plan and suggests that Athena go to Mt. Olympus to wait until the army is under full sail. He states forcefully that “That mortal is a fool who destroys a city, / its temples, its tombs, and precincts of the dead, / making them a waste. He will be destroyed himself” (40).
Hecuba has been rocking side to side in her grief. She is dressed in black, has cropped hair, and is covered with dust and ashes. The chorus of Trojan Women emerges from the entrance to the orchestra and gathers around her.
Hecuba speaks to herself, saying that she should raise her head and acknowledge that Troy is no more. Divinity has shifted its course, and the Trojans are being steered by a god through a course that she does not understand; she cannot control the prow of her own life.
She groans in misery and bemoans that her country, husband, and children are gone; her ancestors’ glory is gone, too. She does not want to remain silent; she wants to lie here on the hard ground and feel the pain. She wishes that she could just surrender to her lamentation, like a ship tossed at sea.
She thinks of the ships that came over the sea, drawn by Helen, the wife of Menelaus. This woman has killed Hecuba’s husband, Priam. She has “run high aground on the beach of this ruin” (42), and Hecuba is now stretched out next to Agamemnon’s tent. In her old age, she was dragged as a slave from her home, her head marked with mourning, a “trophy from the sack of Troy” (42).
Hecuba turns to the women and tells them to mourn with her. She will lead the cry.
Parodos
The first half-chorus asks Hecuba why she cries out. The singers point to the tents before the walls, acknowledging that these women grieve for their enslavement.
Hecuba answers by saying that sailors are rowing off to the ships of the Achaeans. The chorus asks if they are really to be taken away from their homes, and Hecuba sighs that she thinks so; some disaster is at hand.
The first half-chorus tells the women of their fate.
Hecuba hears a commotion and screams that she does not want the “wild, frenzied… dervish maenad” (43) Kassandra to come out. She sighs that Troy is truly no more.
The second half-chorus asks Hecuba if they are to be put to death or taken by sailors. They want to know to whom they’ve been allotted as slaves.
Hecuba also cries out, asking who will be her master. Where will she end up in her old age? She is merely a “drudge, a crone, the counterfeit of a corpse” (44) now, though she was once the Queen of Troy.
The two half-choruses join together and mourn leaving their homes. They will be forced to share a bed with a Greek, and endure great hardships. They wish they could go to Theseus, but not the Eurotas, which nurtured Helen.
They have heard rumors of Thessaly, fertile and rich; this is the land they would want to go to. It is a land “proclaimed by the wreathes of victory” (46) and is watered by the fair river Krathis; it is prosperous and populous.
The chorus sings, and as they do so, Talthybios, the herald of the Greek army, enters. The chorus announces his arrival, noting that he is in a great hurry. They wonder if he is telling them that they are slaves of a Dorian land.
Analysis
The Trojan Women deviates from some norms of Greek tragedy and has perplexed critics due to its alleged plotlessness, but it is one of Euripides’ most frequently performed plays and has been evoked for centuries as a paragon of antiwar propaganda. The third in a trilogy that included the story of Paris Alexander (Alexandros) and the putative inventor of writing and falsely executed Palamedes (Palamedes), the play begins in the aftermath of the Trojan War and consists of the laments of the Trojan women left to wonder what their fate is.
The Prologue begins with Poseidon surveying the damage of the city he and Apollo built, deciding to leave it behind. He paints a vivid picture of the smoldering and sacked city, the destruction wrought by the Trojan horse, the death of King Priam, and the divvying up of the Trojan women. He acknowledges the suffering and prone Hecuba, explaining that her husband and most of her children are dead; he tells the audience that Polyxena is dead on Achilles’ grave, though Hecuba does not yet know this. He is joined by Athena, who, in her explanation that she desires Poseidon’s help to destroy the Greeks for blaspheming her temple after being on their side against Troy for decades, indicates two of the main themes of the play: the fickleness of the gods and the absolute irrationality and uselessness of war. What good did defeating Troy do if one is simply to die at sea on the way home? Poseidon warns, “That mortal is a fool who destroys a city, / its temples, its tombs, / and the precincts of the dead, / making them all a waste. He will be destroyed himself (40).
Critic C.A. Luschnig, like many interpreters of the play, sees it primarily as about “the vanity of victory in war” and “the utter waste and folly of war.” Everything that Troy once was is destroyed, its people murdered, raped, or made to be concubines and slaves. The younger generation is wiped out to prevent Troy from rising again, while its older generation heads limply into senescence in foreign lands. The Greeks are victorious, but in their victory, they indulged in excess, and that excess now spells their doom; in their desire for conquest, they also left their own homes in disarray and emptiness. Their fate is perhaps even justified, Luschnig notes, for there is a “pattern of the Greeks in victory, a pattern of arrogance and insensitivity in their dealings with gods and men.” The awareness of future punishment for the Greeks would bring grim happiness to the Trojan women if only they could know about it, but the only person who does know what is going to happen, Kassandra, is cursed such that no one believes her prophecies. Thus, all the suffering that Hecuba and the other Trojan women endure is to never be countered by justice; it just is for as long as they live.
Hecuba is the character through which the audience glimpses the true horrors of what war brings; she is one of the most famous sufferers in Greek tragedy. She has lost nearly everything already—Priam, Paris, Hector, her position as Queen, her city—and she is poised to lose much more—Polyxena, her grandson Astyanax, and all hope for the future. Her physical body endures the pain of being on the ground, which momentarily takes away some of the psychological pain. She finds no reason to not give full vent to her emotions, for it is the only thing she can do.
The chorus of Trojan women, who will support her in her lamentation, joins Hecuba. They are the other women left husbandless and childless, worried about their coming exile from the city into the households of foreigners. Because this is such a traumatic thought, they engage in ruminations about how it would be nice to live in Thessaly with its “fertility, richness, and nodding crops” (45) or Sicily, a land “watered by the fairest of all rivers” (46). These hopeful thoughts are mere delusions, though, shattered almost immediately by the person of Talthybios, here to tell them where they are actually to go.
A note: despite their similarities in suffering, there are class and age differences between the women in the play. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz explains of Hecuba that “as the former queen, Hecuba’s mourning is for the city and its wealth: Troy is no more, and she is no longer Queen of Troy…She stresses her former grandeur…and the songs she used to sing that were appropriate to her royal station.” Also, because Hecuba is old, she will be a slave; the younger women will instead be sex slaves and concubines.
