The Trojan Women E-Book

Euripides

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

“The Trojan Women“ is a tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. It was first presented at the City Dionysia of 415 BCE, along with two other unconnected tragedies, “Alexandros“ and “Palamedes“, and the comedic satyr play “Sisyphos“, all of which have since been lost to antiquity.
The play is a famous and powerful indictment of the barbarous cruelties of war. It was first produced only months after the Athenians captured the city-state of Melos, butchering its men and reducing its women to slavery, and the mood of the drama may well have been influenced by Athenian atrocities.

"The Trojan Women" follows the fates of Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra and the other women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and their remaining families about to be taken away as slaves (it runs parallel to the events in Euripides‘ play “Hecuba“). It is often considered one of Euripides‘ greatest works, and among the best anti-war plays ever written.

Leseprobe

Euripides

The Trojan Women

Table of contents

THE TROJAN WOMEN

Preface

Introductory Note

Characters In The Play

The Trojan Women

THE TROJAN WOMEN

Euripides

Preface

IN his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. "It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music." Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic. It even goes beyond the limited tragic, and hints that beyond the defeat may come a greater glory than will be the fortune of the victors. And thus through its pity and terror it purifies our souls to thoughts of peace.

Great art has no limits of locality or time. Its tidings are timeless, and its messages are universal. The Trojan Women was first performed in 415 BC, from a story of the siege of Troy which even then was ancient history. But the pathos of it is as modern to us as it was to the Athenians. The terrors of war have not changed in three thousand years. Euripides had that to say of war which we have to say of it to-day, and had learned that which we are even now learning, that when most triumphant it brings as much wretchedness to the victors as to the vanquished. In this play the great conquest "seems to be a great joy and is in truth a great misery." The tragedy of war has in no essential altered. The god Poseidon mourns over Troy as he might over the cities of to-day, when he cries:

"How are ye blind,

Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast

Temples to desolation, and lay waste

Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie

The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"

To the cities of this present day might the prophetess Cassandra speak her message:

"Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!

Yet if war come, there is a crown in death

For her that striveth well and perisheth

Unstained: to die in evil were the stain!"

A throb of human sympathy as if with one of our sisters of to-day comes to us at the end, when the city is destroyed and its queen would throw herself, living, into its flames. To be of the action of this play the imagination needs not to travel back over three thousand years of history. It can simply leap a thousand leagues of ocean.

If ever wars are to be ended, the imagination of man must end them. To the common mind, in spite of all its horrors, there is still something glorious in war. Preachers have preached against it in vain; economists have argued against its wastefulness in vain. The imagination of a great poet alone can finally show to the imagination of the world that even the glories of war are an empty delusion. Euripides shows us, as the centre of his drama, women battered and broken by inconceivable torture - the widowed Hecuba, Andromache with her child dashed to death, Cassandra ravished and made mad - yet does he show that theirs are the unconquered and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality of our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan Women at this moment of the history of the world.

Francis Hovey Stoddard.

May the first, 1915.

Introductory Note

JUDGED by common standards, the Troades is far from a perfect play; it is scarcely even a good play. It is an intense study of one great situation, with little plot, little construction, little or no relief or variety. The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a suggestion that in the utterness of night, when all fears of the possible worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory. But the situation itself has at least this dramatic value, that it is different from what it seems.

The consummation of a great conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans and thanksgivings, the very height of the day-dreams of the unregenerate man - it seems to be a great joy, and it is in truth a great misery. It is conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men, after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.