I Read Plays: The Trojan Women

 

The Trojan Women by Euripedes (specifically the 1905 Gilbert Murray verse translation)

In this play, set after the fall of Troy, four of the royal Trojan women consider their fate. As part of the spoils of war they will be divided amongst the Greek conquerors. Hecuba, Queen and widow of Priam, king of Troy, is to be taken by Odysseus. Her daughter Cassandra will be taken by Agamemnon. Cassandra takes some bitter glee in this; as a prophetess she knows that both she and Agamemnon will be killed by his wife Clytemnestra. Having been cursed, no one believes this prophecy, so after she sings a bleak wedding song she’s carried away.

Andromache, widow of Hector, the son of Hecuba, learns she will be given to Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, her husband’s killer. She has news that Hecuba’s youngest daughter is dead; she is then informed her son will be killed as the Greeks fear he will seek revenge when grown.

Helen, wife of Menelaus, whose abduction/elopement to Troy with Paris was the cause of the war, has been condemned to be killed when she’s taken home. She pleads that it was not her fault, blaming Aphrodite; Hecuba though claims she was loyal only to herself. Eventually Andromache’s dead son is brought to the women, but Andromache has already been taken and it falls to Hecuba to bury her grandson.

This is about grief, and failure and the loss of everything held dear. Hecuba states she has lived her whole life in Troy, and now as a grandmother sees her children and grandchildren killed, her city burned. And the very totality of despair keeps the verse from being what would otherwise be overwrought.

Read This: A classic work of despair and anti-war sentiment
Don’t Read This: Overwrought; failed to convince people of the futility of war; only came second at the festival it was presented