The Tragic Mirror

Sing me, O Muse, a song for Troy,

a strange song sung to tears,

a music for the grave.

O lips, sound forth a melody for Troy.*

In 416, Athens demanded that the neutral island of Melos join the Delian League. When the Melians refused, Athens sacked the small city-state, massacring all the adult males and selling the women and children as slaves. Athens had never been so ruthless. Perhaps fifteen years of war had numbed the Athenian conscience.  But not all the people were emotionally anaesthetized. Shortly after the invasion, Euripides wrote The Trojan Women, a play condemning war, especially naked aggression. The Trojan Women didn’t directly criticize the attack on Melos. On the surface it chronicles the aftermath of the fall of Troy: the enslavement of the women and children by the Greek army (following the massacre of the Trojan men). But for Athens, the play was a looking glass, reflecting her recent past. The time, place and people were different, but the behaviors were identical.  The Trojan Women also mirrored Athens’ future. As the play was being written, she was planning an attack on neutral Sicily.

CASSANDRA:

For one woman’s sake,

one act of love, these hunted Helen down and threw

thousands of lives away.

…The Achaeans came beside Scamander’s banks and died

day after day, though none sought to wrench their land from them.

In The Trojan Women, Euripides retells the story of Troy’s fall, not from the Greek point of view, but from the perspective of the losers, the Trojan women. This would be like an American filmmaker making an anti-war movie in the middle of the First or Second Iraq or Vietnam war — from the enemies’ point of view. How would American audiences respond? Would the film win any awards?**

Edith Hamilton, one of the translators of The Trojan Women, says in her preface to the play: “Athens was fighting a life-and-death war. She did not want to think about anything. Soldiers must not think. If they begin to reason why,*** it is very bad for the army. Above all they must not think about the rights and wrongs of the war. Athens called that being unpatriotic, not to say traitorous…And Euripides kept making her think. He put play after play on the stage which showed the hideousness of cruelty and the pitifulness of human weakness and human pain.” He showed the Athenians their behavior from the inside out. Scraping away the gilded surface of war — the pomp and glory — Euripides compelled his audiences to confront the horrid reality beneath. The Athenians’ worst actions were performed on stage before their eyes. Euripides must have believed that if people face the horrors of war and the consequences of their most inhumane behavior — instead of being blinded by dreams of glory and machismo — they would strive to avoid armed conflict. The same principle can be applied on a personal level. If after hurting someone, you suddenly enter into his or her feelings so that you experience that person’s pain in your own nerves, would you be as likely to hurt him or her again?

The Trojan Women opens with Poseidon and Athena (patron goddess of Athens) plotting to punish the Greeks for defiling Trojan virgins at Athena’s temple after the fall of Troy. Was this also a mirror of Athenian behavior in Melos? Athena asks Poseidon to “give the Greek ships a bitter homecoming.” He promises to do so, saying: “The fools, who lay a city waste…so soon to die themselves.” His words were prophetic — for 5th-century Athenians. But they couldn’t see it, or didn’t want to.

*From the first ode of The Trojan Women, tran. by Edith Hamilton.

**The documentary Hearts and Minds, shot at the end of the Vietnam War, focuses on the sufferings of the Vietnamese people. The nomination of the movie for an Oscar led to a explosive fight at the 1975 Academy Awards between actors who supported the film and those who felt it was disloyal. Hearts and Minds did win best documentary that year.

***Allusion to Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade—“Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.”

Facing the Past to Avoid Future Disasters

To teach his audience to empathize with the sufferings of war victims, whether they be Trojans, Melians or whomever, Euripides takes us into the hearts and minds of the Trojan women. As the play opens, the scope of Troy’s disaster isn’t fully apparent to the Trojan women. At first they cling to shreds of hope, which dulls the impact of the disaster. But the truth gradually dawns on them — and us — like a slow sunrise until reality comes into sharp, painful focus. Little by little, the women face their new condition.

2nd Half-CHORUS:

Who will lead me away?  An Argive?

…Unhappy, surely, and far from Troy.

QUEEN HECUBA:

Who am I that I wait

here at a Greek king’s door?

A slave that men drive on,

and old gray woman that has no home

Shaven head brought low in dishonor.

Even the Trojan queen, who here contemplates the collapse of her royal identity, will now be a slave, an ex-queen bowing before an enemy king.

As their awareness of their tragedy increases so presumably does the audience’s awareness of what Athens did to the people of Melos. It’s not surprising that the play only won second prize at the Great Dionysia that year.

How the women communicate, even on the most basic level, changes. When the chorus sees a Greek herald approaching, they know their fate rides on his message.

CHORUS OF TROJAN WOMEN:

See now, from the host of the Danaans

the herald, charged with new orders, takes

the speed of his way toward us.

What message? What command?

Since we count as slaves

even now in the Dorian kingdom.

The chorus “corrects” its wording from “What message?” to “What command?” as the realization of their fate sinks in. As slaves, they will be given orders, not messages. They have to readjust their thinking, alter it forever. They also gradually realize, as they hold their children tight, that they will never see them again. The children will be sold to the highest bidders or worse.

HECUBA:

My daughters, maidens reared to marry kings,

are torn from me. For the Greeks I reared them.

All gone — no hope that I shall look upon

their faces any more, or they on mine.

But one of the children will not be sold; he will be hurled off a cliff. The Greeks fear the small son of Hector, Troy’s greatest hero. If they let him grow up, he might rebuild Troy and seek revenge. So they murder him. His mother, Andromache, imagines the child’s last terrible moments of life as the reality of what is about to happen to him settles in with terrifying clarity.

ANDROMACHE:

How will it be? Falling down — down — oh, horrible.

*                      *                      *                      *

Yours the sick leap head downward from the height, the fall

where none have pity, and the spirit smashed to death.

O last and loveliest embrace of all, O child’s

sweet fragrant body…

Now once again, and never after this, come close

to your mother, lean against my breast and wind your arms

around my neck, and put your lips against my lips.

ANDROMACHE:

God has destroyed me, and I cannot —

I cannot save my child from death.

Even the repetition of the expression “I cannot” lets us feel Andromache’s awareness as it comes into ever sharper focus in her mind.

The women not only lose their children and their hopes for the future, but their past, in a sense, is ripped out of them too. They watch it disappear in front of them as Troy burns.

CHORUS:

Gone now the shining pools where you bathed

the fields where you ran

all desolate.

HECUBA:

The dust is rising, spreading out like a great wing

of smoke.

I cannot see my house.

CHORUS:

Lost shall be the name on the land,

all gone, perished. Troy, city of sorrow,

is there no longer.

The women will never see their homes again, never walk through the fields they played in as children. All they knew and loved burns in the conflagration, as if it had never been.

Did this powerful play (a play about awareness) make the Athenians feel guilty for the massacre of the men of Melos and the enslavement of the women and children? We don’t know. We do know it didn’t stop them from attacking Sicily. If it had, the Athenian empire might have survived.

Sometimes instead of facing things, people destroy the one who shows them the truth. Euripides wasn’t condemned to death like Socrates, but he did die in exile. Two years before the fall of Athens, Euripides went into voluntary exile. But as Hamilton points out in her preface to The Trojan Women, “A Pacifist in Athens,” “Men did not give up their home in Greek and Roman days unless they must. All we are told is a single sentence in the ancient Life of Euripides that he had to go away because of ‘the malicious exultation’ aroused against him in the city.” The Athenians resented him. We can only assume it was because his plays compelled them to confront topics they preferred not to think about.

Jesse Bryant Wilder, Editor

NEXUS – PALLAS COMMUNICATIONS, INC.

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