Trojan Women (Murray Translation)

The gods debate above, but below, the women of Troy wait to learn their fate. After ten years of war, the city has fallen. Husbands are dead. Children will be murdered. And the survivors will be divided like property among the conquerors. Euripides strips away the glory of the Trojan Horse story to show what comes after the swords are sheathed: not peace, but systematic destruction of the human spirit. Hecuba, queen turned slave, crawls through the ashes of her palace. Cassandra, cursed by Apollo and violated by Ajax, prophecies her way toward madness. Andromache holds her son as the walls claim him. These are not heroes in the mold of Achilles or Hector. They are witnesses to what war actually costs. Written in 415 BCE while Athens prosecuted its own brutal campaign, Trojan Women stands as the earliest and most devastating anti-war document in Western literature. It asks a question we still haven't answered: what happens to the victors when they treat the defeated as less than human?