Summary
First Episode
Talthybios announces himself to Hecuba, who knows him and fears what he has to say. He confirms that the women have been allotted to their masters, but not as a group. Hecuba asks where she is going. Talthybios will not say anything else right now.
Hecuba then asks who gets her suffering daughter Kassandra, and she is horrified to hear that Agamemnon chose her. At first, she thinks Kassandra is to be just a slave, but Talthybios says she is to be a bride. This shocks Hecuba because Kassandra had been granted a life of virginity by Apollo.
Talthybios shrugs that Agamemnon felt a passion for her, and he does not know why Hecuba is so riled. Hecuba then asks for her youngest child, Polyxena. Talthybios says cryptically that she is serving at Achilles’s tomb. Hecuba can make no sense of this, wondering why her daughter is a “grave attendant” (48). She asks what sort of ritual this is. Talthybios will only say that Polyxena is happy and free of trouble.
Hecuba next asks after Andromache, Hector’s wife and her daughter-in-law. Talthybios replies that she has been reserved for Achilles’ son, Neoptolemos.
As for Hecuba herself, Talthybios admits that she will be Odysseus’s slave.
This information is too much for Hecuba to bear. She wails at her lot of being “the chattel / of an abominable trickster, / an enemy of right, a rabid, lawless beast” (49). She turns to the chorus and asks them to begin their lament her and her evil destiny.
The chorus asks what their own fate is. Talthybios instructs them to fetch Kassandra. He expresses surprise, though, when they begin setting their own tents afire because they are to be taken from Troy to Argos. He orders one of his attendants to procure Kassandra. Hecuba announces that her daughter is coming.
Kassandra’s lyric monody
Kassandra emerges holding a torch, which she gives to Hecuba. She begins to speak of the marriage ceremony, claiming that she will light the flame since her mother is in mourning for her father. She will offer that fire to Hymenaeus, the god of marriage, but she will also make an offering to Hekate, goddess of the underworld.
She calls for her mother to dance. She prays for Phoebus Apollo and Dionysus to celebrate, and she offers sacrifice. Her mother must join the chorus line, she implores. She tells the chorus to dance and sing the marriage hymn. The chorus turns to Hecuba and asks if she can stop her daughter, who seems to be possessed.
Hecuba looks at the torch grimly and sadly says that she never thought her daughter would marry like this. She asks for the torch and says that Kassandra is not holding it straight. She adds that her daughter has not learned any restraint. Turning now to the chorus, she urges the women to bring their own torches and add their weeping to Kassandra’s song.
Kassandra asks her mother to rejoice that she is marrying a king and to be her escort in this celebration. It is glorious, after all, for Agamemnon will take her as a bride; she will kill him and make him pay for what he did to her family. She plans to destroy his house.
Now Kassandra says she will not discuss what might happen when Agamemnon dies, but will instead speak of what she knows from her gift of prophecy: Troy will end up being more fortunate than the Achaeans.
She explains that those men who hunted down Helen killed thousands, but it was for naught. Agamemnon lost his daughter Iphigenia, whom he sacrificed to have favorable conditions to come to Troy. He sought a woman who did not want him anymore. The men who sailed over for him began to die in Troy, but not for a noble cause. They now lie buried in this foreign land, and no one can make an offering for them. As for the Trojans, they died for a noble cause: defending their country. They are embraced by the land and decorously laid out.
Kassandra turns to Hecuba to tell her of the fate of Hector, who was once known as the bravest man. He is now dead and gone, and his name never would have been known if the Achaeans hadn’t come. If Paris hadn’t married the daughter of Zeus, no one would know him.
She concludes that her mother should not mourn for the country nor for her coming marriage, for she will destroy everyone she and Hecuba loathe.
Talthybios, like everyone else who fears Kassandra’s prophecies (part of Apollo’s gift to her), thinks her mad, which is the only reason he thinks she would send the Greeks off with such “sinister prophecies” (55). He marvels that Agamemnon chose this wild woman for his bed; she is not in her right mind. He renounces her words about the Achaeans and tells her to follow him.
On his way out, he tells Hecuba that she will soon serve Odysseus and his wife, Penelope—a “good, prudent woman” (55).
Kassandra laughs at Talthybios for being a “clever lackey” (55) and wonders how he even got his title. She also wonders if the prophecy she knows of her mother—that she will be transformed into a rabid dog after avenging her son Polydoros’s murder—will come true. She does not say all this, but she comments that Odysseus has no idea what is coming for him. He will see the sufferings of the Phrygians as a golden age, for his fate will see him face Charybdis, the Cyclops, Circe, shipwrecks, sacred cattle, and Hades. He will have numerous troubles that he does not yet know of.
She turns to Talthybios and sneers for him to join her bridegroom in the Halls of Hades. She then takes off the wool strands that bound her hair, drops them, and renounces them. She is done with the festivals, and she hopes that the winds will carry the pieces to Apollo.
She asks Talthybios which ship she needs to board, and she warns him that he is sending one of the Furies now, “a single avenger of three crimes” (57). Turning to the chorus, she asks them to help Hecuba up.
Hecuba commands the women to let her be; she can suffer like this if she wishes. She calls on the gods, explaining that she is grateful for her pleasures in life and that her sorrows will contrast strongly with them. She was born to royalty, she explains, gave birth to wonderful children, and was happy. But those sons fell, as did her husband Priam. She saw Troy captured and her daughters snatched away. She will never see them again, and she will be a slave in faraway Greece. She will wear rags and hold open doors—she, the mother of Hector! She is so miserable, and she is angry that one woman caused this.
Now to Kassandra, she sadly asks what catastrophe has loosed her belt of purity—and where is Polyxena? The chorus helps her up, and she wonders why they bother.
The full chorus begins their song of Ilion, their lamentation for the dead. They will sing of how Troy was captured when the soldiers poured out of the wooden horse. Before that, they were filled with joy, rushing to welcome the magnificent horse. They brought it in, not knowing it would stain their land with blood. The light fell and they sang festively, but they did not know what was to come. Suddenly a blood-curdling shout rang out, and babies clenched their mothers in terror, and Ares emerged from the horse, the work of Pallas Athena. Slaughter, devastation, and desolation ensued.
Analysis
Euripides is known among the Greek dramatists for his portrayal of women, which is more realistic, varied, and sympathetic than was customary. His women deal with very private and personal matters such as rape, infidelity, the loss of children, and being a wife. Their fears after the fall of Troy are for their own bodies and their families. In The Trojan Women, women find solidarity in their suffering. The chorus looks to Hecuba for guidance and information, as well as affirming Hecuba’s experiences and suffering. This does not mean that all women feel an affinity with each other: women know their place in society, and they find it easy to blame a woman—Helen—who makes it harder on the rest of them.
One of the things that women have at their disposal even amid the most horrifically debasing situation is the power of song. J.H. Chong-Gossard explicates how song is a rich mode of expression for women. It is “an aural focalizer” that helps the audience to “visualize the world through the singer’s eyes and identify with her experience.” It allows a connection to what is absent, vanished, spiritual, divine, or a memory. Through song, women can “signal transitional moments,” “express resistance,” or “interrogate a male speaker.” Song is the place to share personal information; female choruses are sympathetic and keep women’s secrets. Dana Munteanu explains, “the entire structure of Trojan Women can be seen as a rhapsodic exchange in which the most prominent women act as both singers and subjects of the song, for the heroines resemble bards.”
The question of Euripides is just how sympathetic he is to women. Sometimes the audience sympathizes with the women, such as Hecuba, while other times she is a figure of unbelievable and off-putting piety like Andromache, or a terrifying figure like Medea and Phaedra. He creates complicated characters female characters that cannot be judged absolutely; women’s problems are caused by men, and their “crazed” actions can often be justified. Women are constantly struggling within the extremely patriarchal world in which they live, and war only exacerbates that reality. And, importantly, these women have stories; Euripides tells those stories.
When it comes to the women in The Trojan Women, Kassandra is perhaps the most fascinating. Cursed with the gift of prophecy that no one believes upon hearing, Kassandra knows what is going to happen to her, to Odysseus, to the House of Atreus, and more. This offers her only some comfort, though, for no one else believes her and everyone simply finds her a “wild, frenzied…dervish, maenad” (43). She is also to be forcibly relieved of her divinely sanctioned virginity by Agamemnon, who has chosen her for his bed.
Nevertheless, Kassandra is the only female character in the play that has autonomy in the sense that she will help to enact revenge. Her individual rebellion is minor, but it is potent. She dramatically enters the scene conducting a mock-marriage ceremony that she asks Hecuba to be part of, ironically invokes Hekate, and revels in her knowledge of what is to come for Odysseus and Agamemnon. She also endeavors to put the Trojans’ deaths in perspective, for they “gave their lives for their country” (54) and were properly taken care of in death, whereas the Greeks died in a foreign land essentially for no reason. Dana Munteanu sees Kassandra as desirous of proving that “martial glory belongs to the defeated rather than the victors” and that “Cassandra adds herself to the list of glorious Trojans” because she will destroy Agamemnon.
The entire scene with Kassandra is a mixed one, ultimately; there is some grim sense of pleasure at the imminent revenge, but, as critic Raymond Anselment writes, “Cassandra’s arguments, although they rationally suggest the paradoxical victory of the defeated, offer scant consolation; only the dead—and Cassandra must die to fulfill the revenge promised—find grim and ultimately meaningless satisfaction.”
