Why sing in hell? What do you sing in hell?
Euripides’ Trojan Women (Troades) explores, with rare depth, human suffering and human identity. The women of the title

are awaiting the Greek ships to carry them to slavery after their men have been slaughtered. The backstory is well known. The Trojan prince Paris, also called Alexander, judged a beauty contest among three goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Hera and Athena tried to bribe him with military power, but Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. Following Paris’ carrying off Helen from Sparta, the Greeks, led by her husband, Menelaus, and his brother, Agamemnon, besieged Troy for ten years. They finally captured the city by building a wooden horse and filling it with soldiers. Believing the horse an omen of good fortune, the Trojans brought it into the city and lost the war and their city.

Since its first performance in 415 BC, Euripides’ play has been applauded on the stage but has presented problems for modern critics. Is it a cautionary tale against war? Does it reflect the Athenian massacre of Melos in 416? Or their self- destructive Sicilian invasion of 415? Is it just a series of loosely connected scenes of pathos? Is it one long scream against the unbearable horrors of fate, part of Euripides’ “most unmitigated misery ever witnessed on a stage” (E. Segal, Oxford Readings, 244)? Is this what Aristotle really meant by calling Euripides “the most tragic of poets” (Poetics, 1453a)? Does nothing redeem the misery? Why then did it influence Roman writers like Ennius and Accius and inspire Seneca’s greatest play? Why does it have ever-popular modern performances and adaptations? Note the film version of 1971 by Michael Cacoyannis.

Modern scholars have stressed the play’s original context as one part of a probably connected trilogy, the form used by Aeschylus years before, then revived by Euripides. Although fragments of the other two plays have survived, we are missing many details. About AD 200, Aelian writes that Xenocles, “whoever in the world that is,” won first prize in 415 and “second to him was Euripides with Alexandros, Palamedes, Trojan Women, and the satyr-play Sisyphus” (Kovacs, Euripidea, 428). The first play deals with the story of Alexander and the prophecy that he would be a “firebrand” to destroy Troy. He is to die by exposure, but he is rescued and brought up by slaves. His parents think he is dead. He returns to the court and defeats his brothers in an athletic contest. Thinking they were bested by a slave, his brother Deiphobus and his mother Hecuba plan to kill him, but somehow Cassandra discovers his identity and he is reinstated as a prince of Troy.

The second play features Palamedes, the inventor of writing, who had once discovered the trick by which Odysseus had tried to avoid going to the Trojan War. In this play, Odysseus, out of revenge, plants some money under Palamedes’ tent and accuses him of selling out the Greek army. He is killed for treason. His brother, Oeax, alerts their father, Nauplius, by writing on oar blades and throwing them into the ocean. Later, his father tricks and destroys the returning Greek fleet by setting up false signal fires on the coast of Euboea.

Is Troy then destroyed because Priam and Hecuba did not kill their child? When Poseidon and Athena agree at the beginning of Trojan Women to destroy the returning Greek fleet because Ajax has violated Athena’s temple, are they also avenging what Odysseus did to Palamedes, so that the conquerors as well as the conquered are punished? That might be true if Aeschylus or Sophocles wrote the play. But with Euripides we are not sure. Should, or could, Priam and Hecuba kill their newborn child? Are the gods unfair?

Or are there gods? Hecuba’s prayer is typical of Euripides’ employing the gods and questioning them at the same time:

O support of earth, having your seat on earth— Zeus, or air—whoever you are, difficult to know, Either necessity of nature or mind of man,
I pray to you. In silent ways,

You lead all mortal affairs to justice. (884–888)

The play opens with an agreement between Poseidon and Athena to destroy the victorious Greek fleet, a prophecy we must keep in mind as the play progresses because, gods or not, it came true, but after the action of the play. This retribution may imply the justice that Hecuba longs for. Within the action, we see no retribution, only the suffering of the women and their reactions. Two other relevant fates also occur after the play, and the Greek audience was aware of them. Hecuba, taken as a slave by Odysseus, never reaches his homeland of Ithaca. She is changed into a mad dog and leaps from the mast of the ship to an ocean death (cf. Hecuba, 1259– 1273). Helen, taken back to Sparta supposedly to die, becomes the complacent housewife who breezily tells her tale in Homer’s Odyssey (4.235–289). All three extraneous events affect us as we watch or read this tragedy.

The destruction of Melos occurred a few months before the play. The Athenians destroyed the city, massacred the men, and sold the women and children into slavery. The play is often read as a protest against this atrocity and against the planned Sicilian Expedition that turned out so disastrously later in 415 (Murray, Euripides and His Age, 63–65), but there are no references to Melos in the play or to the Sicilian Expedition. Perhaps Euripides did not have enough time to write a Melian play and rehearse a chorus (Kip, “Euripides and Melos”). Even if he did, such horrors were all too common in the ancient Greek world. Such a protest seems to jar against the praise of Athens within the play and against classical Athenian ideology (Sidwell, “Melos and the Trojan Women”).

Is the play a general condemnation or critique of war, as it is often read (Murray, Euripides and His Age; Sartre, “Why the Trojan Women?”; Vellacott, Ironic Drama; Croally, Euripidean Polemic)? Surely the suffering of war is the subject, and in 415 BC many felt that Athens was courting destruction by deciding to extend its empire to Sicily, a prediction that turned out to be unfortunately true. At the same time, Athens was still at war with Sparta and had been for fifteen years. But war was a constant condition of ancient Greek life. Poseidon condemns only excessive and irreligious violations committed in war, not war itself:

Foolish is the man who plunders cities,
Temples, and tombs, the sacred places of the dead. Bringing havoc, he will be destroyed. (95–97)

And Cassandra reveals that just wars are those fought on behalf of a city-state:

He who thinks well must avoid war.
If it comes, to die nobly is not a shameful crown
For the city, but to die ignobly is a disgrace. (400–402)

The cruelties of war are the subject of the play, but we must seek further for its theme. One complication is that we cannot say that there is no humanity in the play if we follow carefully the reactions of the herald, Talthybius (Gilmartin, “Talthybius”). On the other hand, to trace the cause or origin of the suffering leads us to gods who might not exist. Instead of the sense of divine justice in the world that might characterize a play by Aeschylus or Sophocles, we find a dialectic that questions without

answering directly. The Greeks in general might be the villains, but they do not appear on stage.
In the play, Euripides presents the issue of the cause of the war in a “trial” scene between Helen and Hecuba (914–1032).

The supposed cause of the war, Helen, confronts the greatest living victim of the war, Hecuba. Helen presents her defense in essay form (rhesis), followed by Hecuba’s rebuttal. Helen was often seen in Euripides’ time as a whore, but she was also considered a victim. The tale of her flight with Paris leaves open her complicity: runaway or abductee?

Defenses of Helen focus on her as a victim of Zeus’ plan to reduce the human population (the Cypria). The orator, Gorgias, wrote a seemingly lighthearted defense of Helen. Gorgias claims that she was the victim of the gods, love, force, and rhetoric (Encomium of Helen). Helen uses these arguments in the play. To a modern audience, they might appear sophistical, but many ancient Greeks still believed in the Homeric gods and their mysterious ways of working and causing human suffering. “The will of Zeus was accomplished” (Iliad, 1.5). These arguments are no more farfetched than today’s that blame God’s plan, evolution, or political determinism to explain tragedy. The argument that Helen never went to Troy at all is not mentioned in Trojan Women but could have been in the minds of the audience (cf. “Introduction” to Helen in this volume). Nevertheless, blaming the gods never acquitted even Greeks of the heroic age from all responsibility (Adkins, Merit, 16). In Euripides’ time, Athens was moving toward rationalism as it shifted away from the world of Homer to that of the polis (city-state).

Helen claims that Hecuba should have killed Paris as a baby because she dreamed he was a firebrand who would destroy the city, an argument that was echoed by Andromache in the play (597) and formed part of the first play in this trilogy, Alexandros. The idea is not so unrealistic if we remember Sophocles’ Oedipus. Like a good dramatist, Euripides avoids simplicity by building up both sides of the argument; the audience can decide.

Euripides may have started as a painter and is noted for his imagery (Barlow, Imagery of Euripides, 15). One of the dominant images in the play is that of feet: dancing feet, marching feet, stumbling feet. Poseidon opens with a reference to the perfect dance of the sea nymphs, the Nereids:

I, Poseidon, have come, leaving
The salty depth of the sea, where Nereids Turn their shining feet in dance. (1–3)

From this symbol of perfection, we degenerate to the broken Hecuba, whose song has lost the dance:

And even this is music to the wretched:
To sing their ruin without the dance. (120–121)

She remembers the days when she led the dance:

I’ll raise the cry,
Not the same dance song
I raised for Troy’s gods once,
When the scepter supported Priam, And my foot was first in the dance With loud Phrygian steps. (147–152)

Cassandra tries to convince her mother, Hecuba, to dance, for Cassandra will avenge Troy by provoking the murder of Agamemnon, Troy’s conqueror, thus bringing down his royal Greek house. The dance has been restored:

Swing your foot high, bring the chorus —Evoe!—
As in the happiest days of my father. Holy is the chorus!

Lead, Phoebus. In your temple and crowned with sweet bay, I sacrifice.
O Hymen, Hymen, Lord of Brides!
Now dance, mother, the lead.

Turn your feet, here and there, with mine in lovely steps. (325–334)

Hecuba cannot fathom her daughter’s prophecy, true as it is. Hecuba’s feet are old, leaden, beaten:

And whom will I serve, I who need
In my old hand a stick for a third foot? (275–276)

Lead my foot, graceful in Troy once,
A slave now, to my bed of leaves on the ground
And my stony pillow, so falling I shall perish. (506–508)

Her foot does not quicken until she forces herself to bid goodbye to Troy:

But, old foot, hurry as you can,
So I may say good-bye to the dying city. (1275–1276)

If the Trojan Women opens with the perfect dance, it ends with a forced march. The chorus closes the play with: March to the Achaean ships! (1332)

It would be too easy to say that the suffering in the play has been resolved into acceptance. As we shall know by the end, too much has happened dramatically and has been said lyrically to see the ending as a solution, or even a real resolution. The play begins in despair and increases in despair, as hope yields to hopelessness and reality fades to memory and dream. What we witness and experience is the heroic female spirit enduring the worst. Their despair contrasts with the grandeur of some of Euripides’ greatest odes, celebrating and lamenting the glory that was Troy. At one hopeful moment, Hecuba believes that Troy

will live on in poetry (1242–1245). But later she and the chorus say the name will die (1278, 1319, 1322). We know it will not. Perhaps we could not bear the thought. But the characters do not know the future. In their cataclysm of suffering, they endure ignorance and sorrow. For them, hopes rise only to fall in an increasingly dramatic sequence. The human spirit wrestles with dream and fact, grand memory and future pain, madness and grief, hate and love, identity and annihilation. But the human mind goes on living, coping, dreaming, remembering, despairing, changing, thinking, even philosophizing, and doing these activities over again, refusing to fall silent, refusing in its way to die. Formally, and so, aesthetically, these actions are elevated to dialogue, song, ode, and dance. The Dance of Life and the Dance of Death. The mystery of life and its pain have not been simplified but reproduced and amplified. The wonder is that human nature can endure, and express, so much so well. The Trojan women’s endurance and their continued spirit are their heroic triumph. Unlike all other Greek characters in Greek tragedy, Hecuba never leaves the stage.

Note on the Greek Text

I have used as my main text James Diggle’s Oxford Classical Text, Euripidis Fabulae, II (1981). (Line numbering corresponds to Diggle’s text, not to my translation.) I have also used these editions:

G. Murray, Euripides, Euripidis Fabulae, II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913).
W. Biehl, Euripides, Troades (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970).
K. H. Lee, Euripides, Troades (London: Macmillan, 1976; 2nd ed. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1997), with commentary.
S. A. Barlow, Euripides, Trojan Women (Warminster: Aris and Philips, 1986). J. Diggle’s Oxford Classical Text with commentary. D. Kovacs, Euripides, IV, Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).