"The men who hunted down a single woman and, in Helen, a single
Kypris
destroyed countless thousands."
During the period in Euripides wrote The Trojan Women, there was a strong belief among the Athenians that the Peloponnesian War had been instigated by Pericles in response to a domestic situation involving his mistress Aspasia. The massacre on the island of Melos by the Athenians may have inspired Euripides to compose this play about an extraordinarily similar event because Athenians at the time were curiously quiet in their condemnation of the slaughter on Melos. Cassandra’s reference to Helen being the cause of the Trojan War was a direct reminder of Aspasia’s alleged role in igniting the current distress.
"There is no end to my sickness, no term.
One disaster comes to vie with another."
Hecuba, the Queen of Troy on the precipice of becoming a slave of Athens, is by this point in the play situated as one of the most tragic and worn-down figures in Greek drama. She bemoans the hatred expressed toward Troy while questioning the will of God: she has lost her husband, her children, her throne and, indeed, her entire civilization and its history. She vacillates between lament and shoring herself and others up with a modicum of hope even if it might be futile to do so.
"First then: I say that when that woman
gave birth to Paris she produced the beginning of troubles.
Second, Old Priam destroyed both Troy and me, when he failed to
kill the infant,
that bitter dream image of a torch then called Alexander."
The dramatic showcase of the play's central conflict is a showdown between Helen of Troy and the Queen of Troy, Hecuba. The blame has been placed upon for Helen for the fall of Troy, but Helen’s defense is one that targets multiple events that took place before she got involved and were out of her control. Here, she starts by actually placing part of the blame on Hecuba herself—along with old King Priam—for defying the order of the oracle to kill the infant Paris. She has a point, to an extent, and though the audience comes away from Helen's speech assured of her desire to blame anyone but herself, they cannot rationally place all of the blame on her. There is an entire network of culpable gods and humans; war simply isn't that easy to start and stop.
"You, go face the men who will stone you to death.
By a quick death you will repay the long sufferings of
the Achaeans."
Menelaus, King of Sparta, is far less concerned with the political dimension of whether Helen was the cause of the war or not. He is merely a husband who was wronged and wants to exert a little revenge—and if he can disguise that person vendetta as an act of political justice, so much the better. Hecuba, however, would rather that Helen be killed immediately than taken back by ship to pay her debt. She fears that during the course of the voyage, Helen will once again bewitch her husband and he will forget her debt. Students of the classics will realize this to be exactly what happens, further emphasizing Euripides's point that war is useless and rarely results in any positive changes.
"A cloud of dust and ash lifting up
to the blue of heaven on wings of smoke
will take from me the sight of my home."
Troy is burning, and shortly after Hecuba makes this speech, its protective walls collapse in ashes. The collapse of Troy is not just the defeat of an army or the victory of one enemy over another: Hecuba realizes that as the city of Troy turns to dust, so too do its glory and its history. Whatever will be left to tell of it will be but a shadow of the truth. Interestingly, though, she does realize the story will be told, which matters—it will just be from a place of "Troy once was" rather than "Troy is."
"Women of Troy, begin your lament for me."
The chorus is an important part of Athenian drama. A collective character, it supports the main speaker and reinforces the themes of the text. Trojan Women is one of fourteen Euripidean dramas that have female choruses, which Sheila Murnaghan sees as "related to [Euripides'] extensive and provocative treatment of female characters in general, which is marked by attention to the inner lives of private and ordinary people and a sense of women as especially vulnerable to onslaughts of strong emotion and to the hardships imposed by tyranny and war." Hecuba leads the chorus but sometimes she rests on them; the protagonists and chorus are intrinsically linked. This is more apparent during times of war than peace, but Euripides is "attuned to the bonds that unite a group of ordinary bystanders and connect them to the heroines for whom they become sympathetic listeners and loyal accomplices."
"That mortal is a fool who destroys a city,
its temples, its tombs, and the precincts of the dead,
making them a waste. He will be destroyed himself."
The term "deux ex machina" means "god from the machine" and derives from the convention in Greek tragedy where a god was typically lowered onstage near the end of the play to bring it to a close; it more generally means the appearance of a person or thing that contrives to solve a problem in the plot. Interestingly, in The Trojan Women, the gods do not appear at the end but instead at the beginning. They explain that Troy's revenge will occur when the Greek ships are destroyed at sea, but the Trojans do not know this. This is done, Francis M. Dunn explains, to succeed in "satisfying curiosity about the future without generating interest in the future of the actors onstage. The plot is thus deprived of expectations, and the women are deprived of hope."
"I, a mother,
will lead the piercing keening,
sorrowful as the lament of a feathered bird."
Hecuba isn't the average Trojan woman, and Euripides doesn't portray her as such. She is the fallen Queen, the former wife of the leader of the city. She is stripped of all of the material and symbolic vestiges of her station, as well as any sense that her line will continue. However, as critic Raymond Anselment notes, "Hecuba refuses to relinquish her communal responsibility." When she refers to herself as a mother here, she does not simply mean that she is the mother to her biological children; rather, she means that she is the mother to all the women and the city's survivors as a whole. She calls them "my children" and seeks the information they need. She tries to provide hope and counsel when she can, but she also leans on them for their support. When Andromache wishes for death, Hecuba counsels her, "her gesture, an affirmation of life, is symbolically appropriate; as a mother, the source of life, she gropes for meaningful purpose in life."
"But, if war comes, there is no shame in dying nobly for one's city.
To die as a coward is the crown of infamy."
It is common to infer an antiwar stance on the part of Euripides when it comes to this play, and indeed, the themes of the irrationality, folly, and tragedy of war are impossible to deny. However, there is still the sense that war is an inevitable part of Greek life and that the playwright and his characters see more nuance than the modern audience might. For example, Kassandra has a lot to say about the war, but she actually discusses how honorable it is to die for one's city/country, which is what the Trojans did, and how absurd it is to die in a foreign land away from one's kin, as the Greeks did. The other thing about war is that it does indeed bring fame. After bemoaning the fact that the gods seem absent, Hecuba admits, "Yet, had not some god turned our world upside down / and buried our towers in the earth, we would have been ciphers. / We would have never been the subject of song; / We would never have provided an argument / for the Muse of mortal poets yet to be born" (93). Thus, perhaps The Trojan Women is not categorically antiwar; it is more anti-excess, or simply suggestive that we be aware of the realities of war even if we can do nothing to change them.
"Be worthy of yourself. Kill this woman! And lay down this as
a law for other women:
The wife who betrays her husband dies!"
Euripides was known among the classic dramatists for having a sympathetic view towards women and for depicting them as not only three-dimensional but also as capable and analytical. However, it would be wrong to suggest that he is a "feminist" (an anachronistic term anyway). The women in the play show solidarity and an understanding of men's responsibility for their current distress, but that does not mean they have a more meta-understanding or appreciation of the female nature or experience. The Trojan women band together but leave Helen out of it; in fact, they blame her almost exclusively for the war and criticize her for her "shameful" behavior. Critic Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz writes, "the words Hecuba and the Chorus use contribute to the vindication of the army and the vilification of all women...The Chorus...uses Menelaus' masculine pride to goad him into action. Thus, by blaming Helen, Hecuba and Chorus are complicit in the further taming of women."
