The Trojan Women is the surviving work from a trilogy that also included Alexandros and Palamedes. Sisyphus is the accompanying satyr comedy, a key component of Greek drama that turned the trilogy into what scholars call a “tetralogy.” Unfortunately, while The Trojan Women exists in its complete form, the other three are largely lost. We will look at what remains of them in order to provide a larger context for Women.
The first in the trilogy is Alexandros, the tale of Paris (also known as Alexandros or Alexander). There are surviving quotations and numerous references to it in the work of other ancient authors, but the greatest source is the Strasbourg papyrus, most likely dated to 250 BCE and discovered in 1922. What we know of the work is this: there is a prologue spoken by a god, telling of Paris’s upbringing after he is abandoned by his parents Hecuba and Priam due to a prophecy that he would be the ruin of Troy, his youth and growing arrogance, and his desire to compete in the games sponsored by the crown; a parodos with dialogue between the Chorus and Hecuba, or perhaps Hecuba and Kassandra, Paris’s prophetess sister; an episode where Paris disputes with other shepherds and persuades Priam to let him compete in the games; a scene where Hecuba learns of Paris’s victory; an episode where Paris’s brothers discuss the young man’s victory in the games and their subsequent request to their mother Hecuba to kill him; Paris arriving at the palace and hiding until it is revealed who he truly is; and his being restored to his rightful place despite Kassandra’s prophecy.
There is very little remaining of Palamedes. Scholar David Stuttard states, “Of Palamedes, less than 40 lines (perhaps a thirtieth of the play) survive, over half of which come from the trial scene. What else we know about the play comes from supposed allusions to it in other authors, for example Euripides’ contemporary, the comic poet Aristophanes, and entries in ancient dictionaries.” The story of Palamedes is that he was a philanthropist and inventor, falsely accused of betraying the Greeks and becoming a spy for Troy. Odysseus prosecuted him, with Agamemnon serving as the judge; both men, as well as the citizens who supported his stoning to death, were depicted as enemies. There may also have been information in the play about Palamedes’s brother Oeax carving the story of the death onto ships’ oars so as to get the truth out to their father, Nayuplius; Odysseus had kept the information about Palamedes’s death from him so as to avoid a response. Finally, other Greek writers see Palamedes as the inventor of writing and, as Isabelle Torrance writes, “both the nightingale, symbol of oral song, and the founding father of a skill which supplants the improvised nature of oral song with a prescribed script.” The Encyclopedia Mythica describes him thusly: “The story of Palamedes, which is not mentioned by Homer, seems to have been first related in the Cypria, and was afterwards developed by the tragic poets, especially Euripides, and lastly by the sophists, who liked to look upon Palamedes as their pattern. The tragic poets and sophists describe him as a sage among the Greeks, and as a poet; and he is said to have invented light-houses, measures, scales, discus, dice, the alphabet, and the art of regulating sentinels.”
Of Sisyphus, there is almost nothing. The only surviving fragment is three lines of dialogue for Herakles: “Son of Alcmena, noblest of mankind / ‘Tis joy to me to see thee safe from death / Returning, and the bloody murderer slain.” This refers to Eurystheus sending Heracles on the Labor to take horses from the Thracian tyrant Lycurgus. Heracles slew Lycurgus and tamed the horses; he was bringing them back to Eurystheus when Sisyphus stole them.
