*86 The chorus begins to chant in anapests.
*87 Ares killed Halirrothius, son of Poseidon, for raping his daughter Alcippe. The “hill of Ares” is the Areopagus in Athens, meeting place of a court that heard capital trials; it was also the setting of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, in which Orestes is tried and acquitted for his mother’s murder.
*88 The city is apparently Oresteion, located near the source of the river Alpheus; as the name suggests, it was mythically associated with Orestes. Euripides is probably inventing this alternative version of Orestes’ future; in most versions, he establishes himself at Argos or Sparta rather than moving to Arcadia. The sanctuary of Zeus at Mount Lycaeon was actually about thirty miles from Oresteion; the cult to the god there was associated with human sacrifice and with wolves (Lycaeus means “wolfish,” recalling the story of Lycaeus, a savage man in myth who turned into a wolf).
*89 This alternate version of the myth is explored in Euripides’ play the Helen.
*90 The final injunctions are addressed to Orestes again. The journey from Argos to Athens involves passing through Isthmia, a city on the eastern side of the Isthmus of Corinth.
*91 The last part of the play is in anapestic meter.
*92 Polluted mortals could not approach gods.
*93 Referring to the Erinyes of Furies, who punish kin murder.
*94 Castor and Pollux were the gods who protected sailors in storms.
INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ TROJAN WOMEN
Homer’s Iliad was already some three hundred years old during the golden age of Athenian tragedy, but it remained the central literary text for the Greeks and colored all their thinking about war and loss. The downfall of the Trojans, made inevitable by the death of Prince Hector near the end of the Iliad, became the Greek paradigm for defeat of every kind, especially since Homer had explored so fully the pathos of the dying city. The Trojans of the Iliad are not “others” or enemies, and indeed are not even recognizably non-Greek. They are noble, heroic human beings, and it is their sufferings, rather than the imminent victory of the Greeks, that form the core of the poem’s ending. The coda of the Iliad consists of a long dirge for the fallen Hector, as his corpse is lamented by his sister, Cassandra, his widow, Andromache, his mother, Hecuba, and even his sister-in-law, Helen—widely hated by the Trojans, who regard her as the cause of the war, but still honored and protected by Hector.
The funeral chants of these women struck a chord in Euripides, and he based his play Trojan Women, produced in 415 B.C., on the same four figures. Undoubtedly the events of his own times gave new meaning to their laments. Athens had by this time seen ten years of an immensely destructive war with Sparta, the so-called Peloponnesian War, and Greek cities caught in the fighting had suffered fates nearly as harsh as Troy’s. Though a shaky truce still held in 415, Athens continued to expand its empire in an effort to gain advantage. Only months before this play was put on, the Athenians had destroyed tiny Melos, an Aegean island state guilty only of unwillingness to join their side. After besieging Melos and forcing its surrender, they put all the men to death and enslaved the women and children. Thucydides, the great historian of the Athens-Sparta conflict, explored the Melos episode in a now-famous dialogue; it later went down in history as one of the Greek world’s worst war crimes.
We cannot know how Euripides felt about his city’s aggressive imperialism, or whether he was, in any sense, “antiwar.” Laments are not the same as protests, and no Greek of the fifth century B.C. would have opposed all warfare on grounds of principle. That said, there were many in Athens (as attested by the comedies of Aristophanes) who felt that the war with Sparta, dragging on without resolution and causing massive upheaval and hardship, was not worth the costs. In this play, as well as in two surviving ones that preceded it (Hecuba and Andromache, not in this volume), Euripides cataloged the sufferings of war’s victims, an approach charged with meaning considering that his audience—Athenian males who had served in recent actions, or voted to support them, or both—had helped engineer those sufferings.
Another contemporary event may have been on Euripides’ mind when he wrote this play, and it was certainly on the minds of its spectators. Right around the time of this production, Athenians opted to send a huge flotilla, filled with troops and supplies, to support their allies in Sicily and, if possible, to subjugate the island. The prologue to the Trojan Women must have been uncomfortable to watch for the audience that had voted (or was about to vote) to send the armada. In an unusual opening gambit—a dialogue between the gods Athena and Poseidon—Euripides allows the audience (but not the characters) to know that the Greek fleet sent to Troy will be wrecked by storms on its way home—the price of an impious rape committed by a minor Greek hero (Ajax, son of Oïleus, the “lesser Ajax”). For Athens in 415, then, words like these, spoken by Poseidon, could hardly be considered a good omen: “What fools these mortals are, to sack a city / with shrines and holy tombs of the departed. / Leaving ruin, they are lost themselves.” Read with historical hindsight, the lines seem prophetic, for the Sicilian invasion force indeed came to great grief over the two years that followed this play, and few out of many returned.
The prologue also explores the causes of Troy’s extinction and the sufferings of its women. Athena is credited with having brought the city down, presumably because of the slight Paris gave her when judging the beauty contest of the goddesses. But she has now changed allegiances and turned against the Greeks. “You hate too much, then love, for no good reason,” Poseidon scolds her, and the charge seems to stick, even though the rape that occurred in her temple partly explains her shift. Meanwhile Poseidon, who has always sided with the Trojans and might now protect them, instead takes his leave of the city, foreseeing that it can no longer offer him sacrifices; his departure feels a bit like an abandonment (compare the swift exit of Artemis at the end of Hippolytus). These gods can offer mortals neither solace for nor insight into the causes of downfall, and their brief onstage appearance—unnoticed by Hecuba, who lies prone onstage while they converse—only underscores their distance from the sphere of human suffering.
Hecuba, the great mater dolorosa of Greek myth, arises as the gods leave the stage. She will provide the axis to what is otherwise an assortment of loosely connected episodes; she remains onstage throughout and vents her grief, or rage, to each of the other characters in turn. She has lost her sons, Hector and Paris, already; soon she will learn (as the audience learns in the prologue) that a daughter, Polyxena, is also dead. She goes now into slavery, along with her daughter Cassandra, her daughter-in-law Andromache, and the members of the Chorus. Cassandra, a virginal priestess of Apollo, will serve as concubine to Agamemnon, and mother and daughter lament her imminent violation (and the death that Cassandra knows will follow) with a grimly ironic marriage procession. Hector’s widow, Andromache, for her part, will become a slave to Neoptolemus—the son of Achilles, who had slain her husband and desecrated his corpse. Hecuba, claiming to have surrendered her will just as a ship’s crew surrenders to a storm (lines 686–95), advises Andromache to forget Hector and make the best of this new bond. She finds hope in Andromache’s son, Astyanax, through whom Troy may someday rise again.
The simile of the ungoverned ship applies not just to Hecuba but to the entire disordered world of this drama, including the Greeks, who largely remain offstage, dispatching their herald Talthybius to do their bidding. We hear hardly anything of Agamemnon in this play, apart from his sexual predation. The leader who ought to be orchestrating the postwar order is nearly invisible. Instead, decisions are made by the casting of lots or by the will of an army “council,” a democratic body (the Greek word used for it at line 721 emphasizes its universal membership). This council, urged on by the wily Odysseus, cruelly decrees that the infant Astyanax must die, hurled from whatever part of Troy’s walls remains standing. Euripides may here be commenting (as he certainly did in two later plays, Iphigenia in Aulis and Orestes) on the state of the Athenian democra
cy in its post-Periclean phase, in which the Assembly, made up of all male citizens, often lacked direction or too quickly gave in to anger when it was thwarted, as it did in the case of the Melians.
At last one of the Greek chiefs does enter the scene, but only to make a decision that will not hold. Menelaus has been accorded the power of life and death over his errant wife, Helen, and a kind of trial now takes place, with Hecuba—her grief transformed momentarily into rage—playing the part of prosecutor. After hearing both Hecuba’s denunciation and Helen’s self-defense, Menelaus resolves that his wife must die, after traveling with him to Sparta. But Homer’s Odyssey had long before this portrayed Helen living out her life happily in Sparta, so we know that Menelaus’ resolve will weaken before he reaches home. As he leads the condemned woman away, Hecuba warns him not to sail in the same ship with her, prompting his weirdly out-of-tune comment—“Has she put on too much weight?” The peculiar exchange hints at what lies ahead. Menelaus is clueless about the power his wife holds over him; she will escape her death sentence by means of seduction and sexual wiles.
Hecuba’s fate, too, was known to this play’s audience to be other than what is resolved here, namely, enslavement to Odysseus. Indeed, Euripides himself had described it in the Hecuba (not in this volume), produced perhaps ten years before the Trojan Women. Driven mad by grief over the murder of her son Polydorus, Hecuba will climb the mast of Odysseus’ ship and drown herself in the sea, after being transformed by the gods into a barking, blazing-eyed dog. This strange, dehumanized death is touched on only lightly in the Trojan Women, when Cassandra puzzles over the seeming falsity of Apollo’s oracle that her mother would die at Troy (lines 427–30). Cassandra herself, the last survivor among Hecuba’s children, will soon die at the hands of Clytemnestra, as she foresees (lines 446–50) and as Aeschylus depicts in the Agamemnon. Her fated end, after the destruction of Astyanax that forms the final blow of this play, will extinguish the royal line, and the last hopes, of Hecuba.
TROJAN WOMEN
Translated by Emily Wilson
I have used the text of James Diggle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), and consulted the commentaries by Shirley A. Barlow (Warminster: Aris and Philips, 1986) and K. H. Lee (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), on particular points of interpretation.
CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
POSEIDON
ATHENA
HECUBA, widow of Priam; queen of Troy
CHORUS of captured Trojan women
TALTHYBIUS, herald of the Greek army
CASSANDRA, Trojan prophetess; daughter of Hecuba and Priam, the late king of Troy
ANDROMACHE, Trojan noblewoman; widow of the Trojan hero Hector
ASTYANAX, young son of Andromache by Hector
MENELAUS, king of Sparta and co-leader of the Greek army
HELEN, wife of Menelaus, whom she left for the Trojan prince Paris (the cause of the Trojan War)
Setting: Troy, outside the tents of the Greeks, which are represented by the central stage building. Hecuba lies on the ground, motionless and unspeaking, while the gods discuss her city.
(Enter Poseidon.)
POSEIDON: Here I am: Poseidon. I have left
the salty depths of the Aegean sea,
where sea-nymphs circle lovely feet in dance.
Phoebus*1 and I constructed these stone walls
round Troy, with careful measure; ever since
I’ve always kept a fondness in my heart
for this, the Phrygian city.*2 Now it lies
in ruins, smoking, sacked by the Greek spear.
A man from Mount Parnassus, Epeius,*3
10
led by Athena’s machinations, built
a horse pregnant with arms, and sent it in
to Troy, inside the walls—a deadly idol.
the Wooden Horse, that holds wood spears within.>*4
Deserted now the sacred groves, the shrines
flooded with blood. By Zeus’ temple steps,
Priam lies dead.*5 Now they are loading up
a massive hoard of gold and Asian loot*6
on the Achaean ships.*7 But they must wait
20
until fair wind arrives to blow them home,
to see their families after ten long harvests—
the Greeks who journeyed to attack this town.
But I shall leave this noble city, Troy,
and leave my altars. Hera and Athena
have won against me.*8 In such desolation
the bonds of men with gods are all diseased,
religion can no longer be respected.
Scamander*9 shrieks with wailing women captured
at spear-point, to be allocated masters.
30
Arcadian men got some, Thessalians others;
some taken by Athenians, Theseus’ line;*10
those Trojan women not yet dealt to masters
wait in the tents, reserved for the top generals.
With them is Spartan Helen, Tyndareus’ child—*11
correctly classified a prize of war.
Look! if you want to see a wretched woman,
here is Hecuba lying by the entrance,
weeping many tears, for many sorrows.
She doesn’t know yet that her Polyxena—
40
poor child!—was slaughtered on Achilles’ tomb.
Priam is gone. Their children, gone. The girl
the god Apollo left with mind run wild,
Cassandra, will be forced to share a bed
with Agamemnon—dark impiety.*12
O city, once so happy, I must leave
your well-constructed towers and firm foundations.
You’d still be standing firm, had not Athena,
daughter of Zeus, decided to destroy you.
(Enter Athena.)
ATHENA: You are my father’s nearest kin, a god
great among gods and highly honored.*13 May I
50
abandon old hostilities, and speak?*14
POSEIDON: Lady Athena, yes, you may, since family
casts a powerful spell upon my heart.
ATHENA: Thank you, my lord; so kind of you. I’d like
to speak of something that concerns us both.
POSEIDON: Do you bring news from any of the gods,
from Zeus or any other deity?
ATHENA: No; but I come to join your power with mine,
because of Troy, where we are walking now.
POSEIDON: But why? The city’s burned to ashes now;
60
could that transform your hatred into pity?
ATHENA: First answer this. Will you team up with me,
and help me to achieve the things I want?
POSEIDON: Of course. But let me know your stake in this.
Have you come to side with Greeks, or Trojans?
ATHENA: I want to comfort my old foes, the Trojans,
and give the Greeks a bitter journey home.
POSEIDON: Why do you jump to change your mind like this?
You hate too much, then love, for no good reason.
ATHENA: My shrine was violated! Did you not know?
70
POSEIDON: I know. When Ajax raped Cassandra there.
ATHENA: And the Greeks said nothing! He’s unpunished!
POSEIDON: Though it was thanks to you they sacked the town!
ATHENA: That’s why I want to hurt them, with your help.
POSEIDON: Ready for anything. So, what’s the plan?
ATHENA: I want to make their journey home pure pain.
POSEIDON: While they remain on land, or on the sea?
ATHENA: When they set sail away from Ilium.*15
Rain will be sent by Zeus, unending hail,
blasts of darkness bursting from the sky.
80
He promised me his thunderbolt, to hurl
a
t the Achaean fleet, to make it burn.
Your job will be to rouse the Aegean Sea;
make it roar with massive waves and whirlpools,
fill up the curved Euboean bay with corpses,*16
so in the future Greeks will honor me,
and my authority, and the other gods.
POSEIDON: So be it; I can help you, there’s no need
of longer conversation. I’ll stir up
the Aegean, and the coast of Mykonos,
90
rocky Delphi, Skyros, Lemnos, all
the cliffs of Caphereus will be filled
with bodies of the dead.*17 Go to Olympus,
and take the thunder from your father’s hand;*18
and watch for when the Greeks let out their sails.
What fools these mortals are, to sack a city
with shrines and holy tombs of the departed.
Leaving ruin, they are lost themselves.
(Athena and Poseidon exit.)
Scene: Hecuba lies on the ground in front of the stage building. The Chorus members gradually emerge from the tents to join her.
HECUBA:*19 Get up from the ground, get up! Lift up your head.
This is not Troy: Troy is no more.
100
I am no longer queen of Troy.
My luck has changed. Accept it.
Sail with the current, sail as fortune blows.
Don’t set the prow of life
against the surging waters. My boat is blown by chance.
Unhappiness and pain—.
How can I ever stop crying? I have everything to weep for:
my homeland is gone, my children are gone, and my husband.
The rounded bellies of our forebears’ ships
are flat. Reef in the sails; there’s nothing there.*20
110
Why should I keep silence? But why speak?
What’s the good of singing lamentation?
I am so unhappy. Now a heavy weight of fate
tosses my limbs around as I lie here,
stretched on my back on this hard bed.
Everything hurts. My head, my temples throb,
The Greek Plays Page 76