The Trojan Women and Other Plays

Summary

This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy. Poseidon mourns the city he built, and Athena, angered that the Greek Ajax dragged Cassandra from her altar, wins his help to wreck the victors on their voyage home. Hecuba, the fallen queen, lies on the ground before the Greek tents. The herald Talthybius announces the allotment of the captive women: Cassandra to Agamemnon, Andromache to Achilles' son Neoptolemus, Hecuba herself to Odysseus, and Polyxena, he says evasively, to tend Achilles' tomb. Cassandra enters waving wedding torches and foretells the deaths and wanderings that await her new masters. Andromache arrives on a cart with her small son Astyanax and reveals that Polyxena has been killed at the tomb; then Talthybius returns with the Greek decision, urged by Odysseus, that the boy of Hector must be thrown from the walls. Menelaus comes to reclaim Helen, and a formal debate follows in which Helen blames Aphrodite and Paris while Hecuba answers that Helen chose her own desire. The play ends with Hecuba washing and burying her grandson on Hector's shield as Troy burns and the women go down to the ships. Euripides produced it at the City Dionysia of 415 BC, where his group of plays took second prize. Iphigenia in Tauris turns to a later chapter of the house of Atreus. Iphigenia, snatched by Artemis from the altar at Aulis, now serves as priestess among the Taurians on the Black Sea, where every Greek stranger is sacrificed. Her brother Orestes, still pursued by the Furies for killing their mother, arrives with his friend Pylades to steal the goddess's image. Brother and sister nearly meet as priestess and victim before a letter brings about their recognition; together they trick King Thoas and escape, and Athena appears to found the Attic rites of Artemis. Hecuba, set on the Thracian shore soon after the fall of Troy, follows the queen through two blows: the sacrifice of Polyxena at Achilles' tomb, which the girl accepts with courage, and the discovery that the Thracian king Polymestor murdered her youngest son Polydorus for his gold. Hecuba wins Agamemnon's leave for revenge, lures Polymestor into her tent, kills his sons and blinds him, and hears him prophesy her own strange end.

Top Lessons

• The defeated see what victors miss

  The Trojan Women tells the war's end entirely from the side of the captive women, and the gods' prologue warns that the conquerors are about to be wrecked in turn. Poseidon's closing words call the sackers of temples and tombs blind, since they too must die. Euripides makes the cost of victory visible in one small body laid on a shield.

• Hope and the will to live after loss

  When Andromache says the dead Polyxena is better off than the living, Hecuba answers that death is an empty cup while life still holds hope. The plays return again and again to whether grief should end in surrender or endurance. Hecuba's own refusals and collapses give the question a human face.

• Friendship stronger than fear

  In Iphigenia in Tauris Orestes and Pylades each insist on dying so that the other may live. Pylades has shared Orestes's exile and tended him in his madness. The play honors a loyalty that is chosen, not owed by blood.

• Persuasion, power and justice

  Hecuba must persuade Odysseus, then Agamemnon, then a court, and she fails and succeeds by turns. Helen and Hecuba debate guilt in The Trojan Women like advocates in an Athenian lawcourt. Euripides shows speech as the only weapon left to the powerless and asks whether it can bring justice.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

These plays are a sustained study of grief in the aftermath of war, and they belong to the history of how madness was imagined before medicine named it. The herdsman in Iphigenia in Tauris describes Orestes's attack on the shore in strikingly physical terms: head tossing, trembling, visions of Furies, a frenzied assault on cattle, collapse and foam at the lips, with Pylades tending him. The Greeks understood such attacks as divine pursuit after blood-guilt; modern readers have compared the description with seizures or psychotic episodes, but that is a reading, not a diagnosis the play supports. Hecuba's repeated collapses, Andromache's argument that the dead are better off, and Hecuba's attempt to throw herself into the burning city bear on the history of suicidal grief. The blinding of Polymestor and his prophecy of Hecuba's transformation close the cycle with bodily violence.

• Iphigenia in Tauris, herdsman's speech

  A herdsman reports how one stranger trembled, cried out at Furies no one else could see, attacked the cattle, and fell foaming while his friend tended him.

• The Trojan Women, Andromache scene

  Andromache argues that death is mere not-being and better than a life of grief; Hecuba replies that life always holds hope.

• The Trojan Women, final scene

  Hecuba tries to rush into the burning city and is restrained by the soldiers before she is led to the ships.

• The Trojan Women, burial of Astyanax

  Hecuba washes and dresses her grandson's broken body on Hector's shield, in one of the longest laments in Greek tragedy.

• Hecuba, blinding of Polymestor

  Polymestor stumbles from the tent blinded by the captive women and cries for vengeance on all-fours like a beast.