Trojan Women

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Euripides: Trojan Woman

Diskin Clay

Duke University

2005 • 1-58510-111-7 • paper • 128 pages • 5½ x 8½ • $8.95

| About the Author | Contents | Introduction |

Description

English translation. The Trojan Women is a play on the consequences of war and the fate of those defeated in war and their victors.

For courses at the college level in ancient drama, Greek drama, Humanities, in departments of Classics, English, Theater, etc., as well as for general readers.

Author

Diskin Clay is R. J. R. Nabisco Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University. His previous books include Paradosis and Survival: Three Chapters in the History of Epicurean Philosophy (Michigan, 1990) and Four Island Utopias: Plato's Atlantis, Euhemeros of Messene's Panchaia, Iamboulos' Island of the Sun, & Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, with Andrea Lee Purvis (Focus Philosophical Library, 1999).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Euripides' The Trojan Women, Translation and Notes
Appendices
     The Trojan Tetralogy: Alexandros, Palamedes, Trojan Women, and Sisyphos
     Gorgias, In Praise of Helen
     Euripides' Trojan Panathenaia

From the Introduction

The Trojan Women is a play on the consequences of war and the fate of those defeated in war and the fate of their victors. Like Aeschylus’ Persians, it is presented from the point of view of the conquered. It was written in the middle of the Peloponnesian War (431-405) and produced in the competitions of the festival of Dionysos in spring of 415, just months before the Athenians launched their great armada against Syracuse and Sicily. If The Trojan Women is a war play, it is not about a specific war; it is about all wars.

The title of the play is Troades, The Trojan Women. It centers on the Trojan women taken captive during the sack of Troy in the tenth year of the Trojan War. One of the captive Trojan women, Polyxena, was murdered before the opening of Euripides’ play. The rest are about to be dispersed as slaves throughout the Greek world, and the son of Hector will be murdered by the victorious Greek army. Yet Euripides’ Trojan Women survives in the dramatic literature and opera of Europe and even in the musical setting for soprano voice of Hecuba’s lament by Gustav Holtz. We are reminded by Gilbert Murray’s version of the play at the beginning of World War I (1915) and the version Jean-Paul Sartre produced during the Algerian War (Les Troyennes, 1965) that Euripides’ Trojan Women revives in the crisis of war and is endlessly adaptable.

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