The Trojan Women of Euripides

Among the surviving Greek tragedies, only Euripides gives us the complete reckoning of a defeated city. The Trojan Women opens on the smoldering ruins of Troy, where Hecuba, former queen, wakes to find her world utterly erased. Her daughters are gone, her kingdom ash, her people slaughtered or enslaved. As the Greek herald Talthybius arrives to parcel out the surviving women like war prizes, Euripides constructs something radical: a tragedy not of heroes or kings, but of the invisible casualties, the wives and mothers whose only crime was being on the losing side. Andromache learns her son will be thrown from the walls. Cassandra is awarded to Agamemnon. Hecuba watches her family dissolve into the Greek fleet. But the play's genius lies in its double vision: Euripides also shows us the victors degrading themselves, their victory hollow, their gods disgusted. Written during the Peloponnesian War, this is ancient theater's most uncompromising anti-war statement, and it remains eerily, terribly relevant. Twenty-five centuries later, we still stage it because it answers a question no one else asks: what remains when the cheering stops?