“Everything hurts. My head, my temples throb,

My ribs ache. I yearn to turn,

To switch my spine and roll back this way, that way,

Listing my limbs to one side or the other,

Making my way toward more songs of sorrow.

For someone in my state, this counts as music:

Sobbing desolation: a noise no one can dance to.”

– Euripides, The Trojan Women (Trans. Emily Wilson in Lefkowitz and Romm, lines 115–121)

There had been many days – long, dreary, uneasy days – when the poet wondered if any of it had mattered. He had written scores of plays; he had produced dozens for the Dionysia; he had won just twice, and the last victory was now sixteen years behind him – an entire generation in the past. Yet he knew – he knew – that his gifts had grown richer with age; that the roots of his talent stretched into deeper and more rare earth as the years passed.

Recently, however, there were signs that his work might not have been in vain. It had been more than a year since the catastrophic failure of the Athenian expedition to Sicily. That failure had ended with hundreds of soldiers and sailor taken captive.

The Athenians were herded into a quarry pit near Syracuse and left to rot, with a mere half-pint of water and a handful of barley for their daily rations. Many had died of starvation, or of exposure to the elements. Some had been sold into slavery – reports claimed these unhappy men had been branded on the forehead upon being turned over to their masters.

Some, however, had won their freedom. They did not win it by dint of a clever escape, or by trickery, or even by a straight fight with their jailors. They had won it by reciting poetry.

His poetry.

The Sicilians, it seemed, were great admirers of the poet’s work. They regarded a good performance of the odes and speeches they knew – or any sort of performance of those they hadn’t yet heard – as a kind of currency. For months now, the Athenians who had secured their passage home in this way had sought the poet out, taking great pains to find him and visit him in his seclusion.

Some of these men were still hollow-eyed from long starvation when they were brought into the poet’s study. Some still bore the livid scars of their shackles at wrist and ankle. “Your songs saved my life, master,” they told him, “your verses brought me home again when I thought all was lost.”

The poet may not have prevailed against his rivals as often as he had hoped to do. But his work, it seemed, had found its way into the hearts of his countrymen – even into the hearts of enemies abroad. He was beginning to believe that his name and his creations might not fade from the world as soon as he left it. He was beginning to hope that somewhere, for a little span of time, people would remember the songs of Euripides.

I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.

Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 35: Euripides, The Trojan Women, Part 1 – This Counts As Music. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.

We have come now to the last of the three surviving tragedians of ancient Athens. In the early spring we met Aeschylus, and walked through his trilogy The Oresteia. In our last two episodes we dove into Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Now we come to Euripides, the youngest of the three men, and the one who has left the largest body of work to the present day.

Not a lot is known for certain about Euripides beyond the fact that he existed and that he began writing plays in his 20s. Tradition has it that he was born in 480 at Salamis – that is, in the year and at the site of the Athenian’s decisive naval victory over the Persians. At the time of Euripides’s birth, Aeschylus would have been in middle age, and Sophocles would have been a teenager whose debut in Athenian society – that is, dancing naked in the street – was still ahead of him.

It’s not clear what kind of family background Euripides came from. Aeschylus and Sophocles were both from wealthy, influential ones. This may not have been the case for Euripides – the comedic playwright Aristophanes jokes about him being the son of a merchant, and about Euripides’s mother selling herbs in the market. Comments by later writers suggest that he was a bitter loner with a disfiguring skin condition and an unfaithful wife, but these shouldn’t be relied on. We just don’t know much about the guy.

What we do know is that he wrote at least 80 and as many as 92 plays (of which just 19, along with some fragments, survive), and that he was first invited to compete in the Dionysia in 455 BCE. He would compete at least 25 times, but only seems to have won the competition a handful of times – my sources for this episode vary as to whether it was three, four, or five times, but the last win was almost certainly a posthumous one in 405 BCE – Euripides died in 406.

If Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex was the Citizen Kane of ancient Athens – a superior work that didn’t win the top prize – Euripides is its Martin Scorsese: often nominated, rarely rewarded, but celebrated as a master of the craft nevertheless.

And now, having said that, I can’t help imagining the Athenian captives winning their freedom by doing impersonations of Matthew McConaughey’s scene in Wolf of Wall Street.

Anyway. Like Scorsese, Euripides was known in his time as an innovator of form and content. For example, one of his most famous plays, the tragedy Alcestis, was placed in the last slot in one of his Dionysia submissions – usually reserved for a comedy. He was also noted for his more cynical and subversive take on the gods. While he was always able to stay on the right side of the sacrilege line, Euripides did“manage to portray with great vividness the gods’ cruelty and lust for honors.” (Lefkowitz and Romm 440)

Euripides was also considered a more naturalistic writer. Aristotle, in his Poetics, reports that Sophocles once declared, “I wrote about men as they ought to be, but Euripides wrote about them as they are.” (Lefkowitz and Romm 440)

Euripides was also admired for his exceptional dialogue and speeches – Aristotle, for instance, described Euripides as the first tragedian whose characters talk in a natural, every-day way. (Hall 2000, xi) This seems to be the reason why, in the century after his death, 10 of his plays were chosen for the school curriculum, compared to 7 each for Aeschylus and Sophocles. The ancient Greeks considered rhetoric and oratory the cornerstone of a good education.

In her introduction to the 2000 Oxford World Classics edition of The Trojan Women, Edith Hall notes that “This poet was clearly fascinated by the theatrical potential of disability, poverty, lower-class occupations, disguise, iconoclastic rhetoric, and vulnerable infants.” (Hall 2000 x) He was also very interested in writing women.

It would be foolish to say that Euripides was a feminist – in a 1997 introduction to an edition of Euripides’s Medea, Edith Hall (her again) reminds us that “patriarchal cultures often use symbolic females to help them imagine abstractions and think about their social order.” (Hall 1997 xxvii) But reading Euripides, you do get the feeling that he was more tuned into women as people than either Sophocles or Aeschylus. Hall notes – sorry, I said “Hall notes”, not “Hall and Oates”, that was last episode’s digression – that this quality of Euripides’s writing was remarked upon in antiquity, too.

I read several of Euripides’s plays before deciding which one to feature on this show, and many of them are heavily weighted with female roles. There’s Medea, the story of a witchy wife who commits an escalating series of crimes against her cheating husband – she should have written songs about it, like Stevie Nicks. There’s Hippolyta, which features a cougar perving on her stepsons, and then there’s Electra, which gives Agamemnon’s daughter a much more active role in murdering her mother than is shown in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, which we covered in February.

All of these are really interesting plays, and you should read them. But I decided to choose one of Euripides’s ensemble pieces for this show: The Trojan Women, which was produced for the Dionysia in 415 BCE. It is essentially a sequel to The Iliad, and it focuses on the royal ladies of Troy as they wait to learn their fates following the sack of their city by the Greeks. Without wanting to go into a long soliloquy about current events, let’s just say a story about people trapped in a city devastated by war feels very of the now.

And it would have felt that way to Euripides’s audience, too. Although the Iliad was at least three hundred years old at the time of the debut of The Trojan Women, its story would likely have had a fresh and painful resonance for Athens. At that point, the Athenians were 10 years into the Peloponnesian War against Sparta – a war that would ultimately last 27 years. There was a truce in place in 415 BCE, but truces are fragile things.

And there was another contemporary issue which might have coloured the reception of the play: a few months before the play came out, Athens committed one of the most horrific war crimes of the entire Peloponnesian War. They invaded and destroyed the small island community of Melos, executing most of the military-aged men and enslaving the women and children. They did this because Melos had refused to take a side in the war.

Trojan Women depicts the horror of war from the perspective of the survivors in a way that might have cut quite close to the knuckle for many of the spectators. As Emily Wilson puts it in the introduction to her 2016 translation of Trojan Women, the subject matter of the play was “charged with meaning considering that his audience – Athenian males who had served in recent actions, or voted to support them, or both – had engineered those [types of] sufferings.” (Wilson, in Lefkowitz and Romm 633)

Adding to the squirm factor was Eurpides’s characterization of the women in his story – they’re presented as quite culturally Greek. The men who watched this production might have recognised their own wives, mothers, and daughters in the women of Troy. Finally, Eurpides’s characterisation of the two actual Greeks who turn up in the play is far from flattering: one is a blood-thirsty, misogynist buffoon, while the other is a smooth-talking apologist for atrocities, whose prettily expressed “regrets” ring hollow.

Edith Hall cautions us that we can’t definitively characterise this as social comment about current events on Euripides’s part:

“No dependable account of Euripides’s own views on politics, women, or war survives, unless we are to arbitrarily select speeches by characters in his plays as the cryptic ‘voice of Euripides’.” (Hall 1997, xii)

Still, this play is not exactly a love-letter to Greek culture. Now that we’ve got some context about it, let’s dive into the story.

[music]

This is, by my count, our fourth foray into the Trojan War Extended Universe: before this we had the big ones, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, then Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which deals with the fate of King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, on his return home from Troy. And isn’t it odd that in all that time, we have yet to see an actual scene featuring the Trojan Horse, which is the bit everyone thinks they remember from The Iliad, though it isn’t even mentioned at all.

Still: this is a sandbox we’ve played in before. Our main characters will be familiar to us, though maybe not as familiar as they were to the Athenians in 515 BCE.

First, we have Helen: she is the face that launched a thousand ships, the woman whose abduction and/or elopement with Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, kicked off the war. There’s Andromache, widow of the Trojan hero Hector, who was killed in combat by Achilles and then had his body dragged around the walls of Troy. There’s Cassandra, who is a princess of Troy – Hector and Paris’s sister, Priam’s daughter – as well as a priestess of Apollo.

And then there’s Hecuba, the widowed queen of Troy. Various versions of the Greek myths credit her with as many as 19 children, but in The Trojan Women she’s portrayed as the mother of just four: Cassandra, Hector, Paris, and another princess called Polyxena. Hecuba is the center of the play. Once she is onstage, she stays there right to the end. The role of Hecuba in The Trojan Women sounds insanely challenging to perform. Edith Hall explains:

“Her part requires not only a powerful singing voice and the ability to deliver elaborate, pointed rhetoric, but considerable physical stamina. Her body seems to symbolize Troy itself . . . she alternately struggles to her feet and collapses to the ground throughout the entire action.” (Hall 2000, xxv)

As the play begins, Hecuba is lying on the ground, prostrate with despair. While our other dramas have been set in front of palaces, Euripides sets The Trojan Women in front of some shabby tents – a prison camp for the Trojan survivors of the war. Onto the stage comes Poseidon, god of the sea. He looks sadly at the wreckage. He had taken the Trojan side during the war, he reminds the audience:

“But I shall leave this noble city, Troy

And leave my altars. Hera and Athena

Have won against me. In such desolation

The bonds of men with gods are all diseased,

Religion can no longer be respected.

Scamander shrieks with wailing women captured

At spear-point, to be allocated masters.” (Lefkowitz and Romm 682)

He points out Hecuba to the audience and catalogues her losses. There are the ones she knows about – her husband Priam, her sons Paris and Hector – and the ones she doesn’t: Poseidon tells us that princess Polyxena has been murdered on top of Achilles’s tomb. He also mentions Cassandra, “the girl the God Apollo left with mind run wild,” who is, as you’ll remember from the Oresteia, reserved as a prize of war for King Agamemnon.

Once Poseidon wraps up his exposition, Athena arrives. She is in a peace-making mood, she tells her uncle, not because she is being magnanimous in victory over the Trojans – you’ll remember she was miffed at them because Paris, prince of Troy, chose Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess over her and Hera – but because she is now furious at the Greeks. The lesser Ajax, Athena says, has defiled her shrine in Troy by raping poor Cassandra in front of the altar. Athena wants Poseidon to ensure the Greeks have a dreadful trip home.

“Your job will be to rouse the Aegean Sea;

And make it roar with massive waves and whirlpools,

Fill up the curved Euboean bay with corpses;

So in the future Greeks will honor me.” (Lefkowitz and Romm, lines 82–85)

Very chill. A reminder that Athena is a war goddess as well as a wisdom goddess: clearly war has the upper hand here. Poseidon is only too happy to help. As he leaves the stage, he utters some lines that may have stung a bit in the aftermath of the destruction of Melos:

“What fools these mortals are, to sack a city

With shrines and holy tombs of the departed.

Leaving ruin, they are lost themselves.” (95–97)

The gods leave. Hecuba stirs, rising to her feet and lamenting her fate bitterly – this first speech of hers includes the passage I quoted at the top of the show: sobbing counts as music for her now. But within this outpouring of grief, there’s also a poisonous undercurrent of hatred towards Helen, which will only develop as the play goes on.

Remember how I said Euripides was an innovator? One of his storytelling strategies involved what’s known as a semi-chorus – a chorus split into two parts. So as Hecuba wraps up her initial soliloquy of woe, half the chorus emerges from the tents – the chorus, in this play, being yet more ladies of Troy. The leader of the chorus asks what Hecuba is yelling about. She explains that she sees the Greeks preparing their ships for departure.

The women all wail: what is to become of them? They each predict different terrible fates: some expect to be enslaved, others to be made concubines, others fear they’re to be killed outright. “Do you know whose slave I’ll be?” one asks Hecuba, pitiably. Hecuba herself knows her own uses as a slave are limited:

“Will I have to serve them as a door-keeper,

Or a nanny, when I was once a queen

And had the glory of the throne of Troy?” (194–196)

The women sing of their grief and degradation. They are afraid of never seeing their homes again, of being raped or forced into marriage with Greeks. They sing of the Greek lands they’ve heard of and wonder which ones they will wind up living in. None of them want to go to hateful Sparta, where Helen is from. Some of them say they hope to go to “the famous, happy land of Theseus: Attica.” (209) This was kind of jarring to read: clearly it’s Euripides doing a bit of pandering to the home crowd in the theatre.

This song is interrupted by the arrival of Talthybius, the herald of Agamemnon. He greets Hecuba courteously, if a little informally. He tells the women they will not be shipped off together; each of them are assigned to different men. Hecuba wants to know about her daughters first. What will happen to Cassandra?

Talthybius tells her Cassandra will go to live with Agamemnon. He clarifies that the girl will be his concubine, his “secret second wife”, not a slave to Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. Hecuba is disgusted: her daughter is meant to be a holy virgin of Apollo! “Passion pierced the king for the god-struck girl,” Talthybius tells her matter-of-factly. (255) He seems surprised that Hecuba isn’t pleased that Cassandra will get to warm the king’s bed.

Next, Hecuba asks about Polyxena. Talthybius is evasive. He tells the queen that Polyxena has been chosen to serve the tomb of Achilles; that she will not leave Troy. Hecuba, in her agitation, passes over following up on this to ask about her daughter-in-law Andromache. It turns out she is now the property of Achilles’s son – a bitter fate for the woman whose husband was killed by Achilles.

Finally, Hecuba asks what’s to be done with her. “You’re to go with Lord Odysseus,” Talthybius says. Hecuba is frantic:

“I’ve been assigned to serve

A filthy liar,

An enemy to justice, a lawless monster,

Who turns everything upside-down

And back again,

With his double tongue,

Transforming friends to enemies and back.” (82–87)

The other women begin pleading with Talthybius to tell them what their fates are, but the herald ignores them. He tells some soldiers nearby to go into the tents and find Cassandra. Agamemnon wants to leave, and he wants his prize to go with him.

But then he cries out – there’s a light burning inside the tent. Are the Trojan women trying to set themselves on fire to escape their fates?

[music]

It turns out that the fire is a torch, and Cassandra carries it as she emerges from the tents. She is in manic mode – even in translation she seems to be babbling, her tongue set loose by some sort of trauma-induced euphoria. Cassandra’s torch, it turns out, is the traditional ancient Greek bridal torch, and in her frenzy she insists the other women celebrate her wedding to Agamemnon with her:

“Dance, Mother, lead us in dancing,

Twirl your feet this way and that, with mine,

Show us the steps we love!

Shout out the wedding song!

Celebrate the bride

With songs and calls of joy!

Come, girls of Troy, in your prettiest dresses,

sing for my wedding!” (332–340)

Seeing her daughter in this state snaps Hecuba out of her spiral of self-pity and agony for a moment. She tries to coax Cassandra into giving her the torch, and orders the other women not to indulge her daughter’s wild fantasies – remember that Cassandra has the gift of prophecy, but is cursed never to be believed when she relates them: they all treat her

She relates a prophecy now, telling Hecuba to rejoice that she is going with Agamemnon, for it means his downfall and the downfall of his wife Clytemnestra – who is, you may recall, Helen’s sister. Even though we know Cassandra is going to be murdered, for her mother’s sake she frames this as an opportunity for justice to be served:

“If my prophetic god

Tells true, this famous Greek king, Agamemnon,

Will have worse luck in his affair with me

Than Helen had. I’ll kill him, sack his home

Revenge for my dead brothers and dead father.” (356–360)

Then she settles into a calmer register and explains to her mother that even in defeat, Troy retains its honor. The Greeks behaved shamefully: going to war for a decade for the sake of one unfaithful wife. Prosecuting that war involved Agamemnon murdering his daughter, Iphigenia. It involved the deaths of thousands of Greeks far from home, where their bodies will lie for all time, unmourned by the families left behind. Meanwhile, the Trojans only acted to defend themselves – an honorable pursuit:

“Sensible people should not wish for war,

But if it comes, be noble in defeat.

That saves us from disgrace, and wins us glory.

So, Mother, do not pity Troy, or me

For my new “husband”, since I shall destroy

My enemy, and yours, by marrying him.” (400–406)

Everyone else on stage takes this as an unhinged rant. Talthybius mutters darkly about how if he were Agamemnon, he wouldn’t sleep with this crazy girl. But he has his orders. He tells Cassandra to follow him to the ships, and he instructs Hecuba to stay where she is: Odysseus will come to fetch her soon.

Cassandra laughs at him. In a long speech dripping with bitterness, she explains that Hecuba will never go with Odysseus – she’ll die in Troy. She briefly describes the ten years of wandering and hardship that awaits Odysseus, but then breaks off: it’s useless to tell people what she knows, even though at times she cannot help but do so.

“Goodbye, Mother. Do not cry for me.

Troy, dear country, brothers, father beneath the earth;

Soon I shall join the dead. I’ll come victorious,

Ruining the house that ruined me.” (459–462)

She tears off the laurel wreath that marks her as a priestess of Apollo, and follows Talthybius offstage, toward the Greek ships. Hecuba sinks to the ground again. Women in the chorus cry out to others: help the queen! But Hecuba tells them to let her be. She then sings of her past glories: queen of Troy, mother of many fine children, but now cast down, her head shorn in grief, her children dead or scattered. The marriages she would have made for her daughters will never happen; her husband was cut down in his own house. And all this in reprisal for one woman’s love affair!

The Chorus responds with their own song of woe, describing how the people of Troy greeted the gift of the Trojan Horse with delight, and how their singing and dancing over the apparent end of the war and departure of their enemies turned to enslavement and bloodshed:

“All the Trojan race was rushing to the gates

To give the virgin goddess,

Whose horses are immortal,

The mountain pine-wood,

Polished ambush of the Argives,

Destruction for the Trojans.

They threw ropes of woven flax around it,

As one lifts the black hull of a ship,

And brought the killer of our country

To the marble temple floor

Of Pallas.” (531–541)

Then their attention shifts: some of the Greeks are passing with a wagon, and in the wagon sits Andromache. Her dead husband Hector’s weapons and armor are piled beside her; in her arms she holds their toddler son, Astyanax. The wagon stops so Andromache can bid her mother-in-law goodbye.

The two women commiserate in their grief – the losses of Hector, the ruin of Troy, and the bitter irony of a war waged because of a love affair. Andromache says several times that she wishes she was dead, and Hecuba tells her not to say such things – even in their devastation, she can see the gods at work. Hecuba informs Andromache about Cassandra being taken by Agamemnon, and Andromache must tell her that Polyxena, her youngest daughter, has been killed on Achilles’s tomb.

Hecuba reels, understanding at last the cryptic comments of Talthybius. Andromache says that Polyxena is lucky to be dead, and even in her despair, Hecuba still chastises her:

“Child, death isn’t the same as seeing the light.

Death means nothing; where there’s life, there’s hope.” (632–633)

Andromache can’t accept this: death, she says, is an end to pain, especially for people who fall from great fortune to disaster. She describes how good a wife she was: a virgin when she came to her husband, and never pined for her family of origin. She was submissive to Hector’s wishes, but able to gently rein in his worst instincts. She encouraged good morals in the women of her household: no gossip or flirting. And for this good, wifely behavior, what does she get?

“Achilles’s son desired me for his wife.

I will be a slave to murderers.” (559–560)

Andromache cannot resign herself to her new master the way she did to Hector. Hecuba tells her she must, for the sake of her little boy: as long as Astyanax is alive, he may yet grow to redeem the city of Troy.

Of course, as soon as she says this – as soon as she confesses she still has a particular hope – Talthybius returns to the stage. He greatly regrets, he tells Andromache, what he must say to her. In fact he doesn’t quite know how to say it, it’s all very regrettable, terrible, even –

Andromache snarls at him to spit it out already.

Odysseus, says Talthybius, has decided that Astyanax cannot be allowed to live. The Greeks will throw the little boy from the city walls to break the Trojan royal line forever.

Andromache wails. Talthybius urges her not to make a fuss about it:

“Be sensible: you have to let it happen.

Don’t resist: be noble in disaster.

You have no power here, just realize that.

You can’t do anything. You have to think.

Your city and your husband, both are gone.

You’re beaten, we can easily prevail

Against a single woman. Do not fight.” (726–732)

If Andromache fails to submit gracefully to the murder of her son, Talthybius adds, she will not be allowed to bury him.

Andromache clasps her son, lamenting that Hector’s heroism and royal blood have condemned her little baby boy. She kisses Astyanax, remarking on the sweet smell of his skin, and then lashes out at Talthybius:

“How can you act with such barbarity?

You think you’re civilized? Why kill this child? . . .

Well, go on then: take him and hurl him down!

You want to do it? Why not eat him, too?” (764–65; 774–75)

She calls down curses on Helen. Talthybius orders some guards to take the baby, and directs others to take Andromache toward the ships. He adds in an aside:

“This is the kind of message

A man without pity shoud bring

A man with a heartless mind –

But mine is not that way.” (786–89)

Whatever helps you sleep at night, Talthybius. It may not be your way, but you did it. He follows the guards who have taken Astyanax off the stage.

[music]

After the women of the chorus sing a long dirge for the lost glories of Troy, a new character enters: Menelaus, the jilted husband of Helen. He arrives in the midst of the traumatised and grieving women in a jolly mood. He chortles over the misfortunes of the Trojans, and insists that he did not wage this war just to get his wife back; he wanted to make Paris and his people pay, and so they have. “Where’s Miss Sparta?” he demands. He wants to take her home to Greece and let the people kill her in retribution for the death she caused.

Hecuba tells him not to call for her:

“Menelaus, I approve your plan

To kill your wife. But flee her hellish sight!

She’ll trap you with desire. She traps men’s eyes,

Ruins cities, burns up homes: she has such charms!

I know her. So do you, so do her victims.” (890–895)

Out comes Helen. Unlike the other women, she is dressed well and seems to be confused about her situation, not in despair about it. It’s hard not to imagine her being played by a wide-eyed Marilyn Monroe, pretending not to understand all these big scary problems with her little head. She knows Menelaus is there to kill her, but, golly, won’t he hear what she has to say, first?

Hecuba warns Menelaus again: she will charm you into letting her live. But Helen gets to speak anyway. It’s a masterclass in what we might today call DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. She begins by blaming Hecuba:

“First, this woman mothered this whole mess

By bearing Paris. Second, her old husband

Ruined both Troy and me. He failed to kill

The infant – nightmare image of a torch,

That Alexander.” (919–923)

There’s some backstory here that the contemporary audience would have known about. We need catching up, though: apparently, while pregnant with Paris, Hecuba dreamed that he would call the fall of Troy. She and Priam exposed the newborn on the slopes of nearby Mount Ida, but, as is the way with doomed infants, he was rescued by shepherds, renamed Alexander, and survived, ultimately being rediscovered and reaccepted by the Trojan royal family. And that survival led to the Judgement of Paris, which saw him choose Aphrodite over Hera and Athena. Aphrodite gave him Helen in response, and here we are.

Anyway. Helen now goes on to make excuses for herself: she was tricked by Aphrodite! Menelaus should never have left Paris alone with her! And she tried many times to escape the city and go to the Greek ships because of how miserable she was in Troy – really!

“So, husband, how could I deserve to die,

When I was forced to that affair, and when

I suffered bitter slavery in that house,

Not victory? But if you want to win

Against the gods, you don’t know what to want.” (961–965)

“Don’t let her get away with this,” the Chorus members beg Hecuba. She is not about to stand for it. She calls bullshit on the whole notion of a divine beauty pageant – what cause would Hera have to seek the approval of a mortal? She’s Zeus’s wife! And Athena is a virgin. No, what Helen wanted was romance, adventure, and riches: Paris was hotter than crusty old Menelaus; Troy was richer and more exciting than grim Argos in Sparta. Hecuba accuses Helen of always trying to have it both ways:

“And when you came to Troy, and Greeks pursued you,

Hot on your heels, when spears were falling fast,

If you heard news your husband might be winning,

You sang his praises to upset my son,

With all the greatness of his sexual rival.

But if the men of Troy were doing better,

that man was nothing. You were always acting

With an eye to fortune, not to virtue.” (1002–1009)

As to trying to escape, ha! A decent woman would have tried to kill herself, and Hecuba never heard of Helen even making the attempt. In fact, Hecuba offered many times to take Helen to the ships, but Helen refused. Hecuba calls her a disgusting monster, and is appalled that Helen would dare to appear before her husband so shameless. Rags, tears, and humble apology would have been decent.

She and the Chorus implore Menelaus to do the manly thing and kill Helen right then and there. But he refuses. He’s still convinced that taking her home and letting the survivors of the Greek dead stone her to death will bring more satisfaction.

“You must not let her share a ship with you!” Hecuba cries. (1049)

“Why not?” asks Menelaus. “Has she put on weight?” (1050)

Even in the face of all this devastation, he’s cracking jokes. He takes his wife and leaves.

The Chorus returns to its preoccupation with its grief. The singers know the hour of departure is coming, and that they will soon be separated from their homes and their remaining loved ones forever:

“Hordes of children at the gates

Are crying, clinging to their mothers’ necks

and wailing,

“Mother, the Greeks are taking me away alone, all by myself,

They’re taking me away from you! I need your face.

I’m just a little girl. They’re taking me somewhere

On their dark ship

Rowing over the sea —” (1088–1095)

But there are fresh horrors yet. Talthybius returns with his retinue of soldiers. They are carrying the body of poor little Astyanax, laid out on Hector’s shield.

“We are leaving soon,” Talthybius tells Hecuba, once the chorus has stopped screaming at the sight of the dead baby. “And Andromache’s new master has already taken her away. She asked that you be allowed to shroud her son for burial.” Talthybius also adds that he has done one customary act already: he has washed the boy’s body in the sacred Trojan river Scamander. Strangely, Hecuba doesn’t thank him for this.

She calls Talthybius and the Greeks cowards for being so frightened of a little boy that they would kill him. She addressed her grandson’s corpse:

“Poor boy, how horribly your own home’s walls,

The ramparts of Apollo, crushed your head

And ripped the curls your mother doted on;

She often used to kiss you there – where blood

Laughs out between the broken bits of skull…

What could a poet write upon your tomb?

‘The Greeks once killed this boy because they feared him’?” (1173–1177; 1189-1190)

She handles the shield, which will act as the boy’s coffin, reverently, remarking that she can still see the imprint of her son Hector’s hands in the leather straps. She binds up his wounds, saying she is a bad nurse, because her bandages won’t heal him.

The women bring clothes and such ornaments as they have to dress the little boy. Hecuba laments that all her sacrifices and attentions to the gods throughout her life have been pointless. She calls her final attentions to her little grandson an empty gesture. Some soldiers take Astyanax away to bury him. Some begin to drag away members of the chorus. And others come with torches: as their final act, the Greeks will burn and raze the city that has caused them so much grief these last ten years.

Hecuba stands amid the devastation and the rising flames; all her hope stripped away from her at last.

“I’m finished, then. It’s over now, the end

The final terminus of all my sorrow.

I’m leaving home, my city’s set on fire.

Up, you old feet, and hurry the best you can:

Let me pay my respects to wretched Troy. . . .

O Gods! But why call on the gods?

They didn’t listen last time they were called.

Come then, let’s rush into the flames!” (1272–1276; 1280-1282)

But she does not have the energy to resist the soldiers as they seize her. The women cry out in horror as the citadel of Troy burns and crashes. The Greeks take them all away, and the stage is empty.

[music]

That is the story of the Trojan Women. Every Greek tragedy we’ve read has been a catalogue of woe, but this one, I think, more than most. I think I have to agree with Aristotle: on the basis of this play, Euripides’s characters are much more pitiable than other tragic protagonists.

I can’t really feel bad for Agamemnon: he sowed the seeds of his destruction when he murdered his daughter to raise a better wind. I can’t really pity Orestes, either – he didn’t have to kill his mother. And while what happens to Oedipus is completely undeserved, he is a murderer who’s not above torturing slaves. Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra, though? They were trying to be good wives and mothers – or in Cassandra’s case, a good and chaste priestess. They paid terrible prices for it.

Speaking of Cassandra, she mentioned that her mother Hecuba would die in Troy. Euripides doesn’t show us that in The Trojan Women, but audiences would have known the rest of her story. There seem to be two main versions: One claims that Hecuba threw herself into the sea rather than get on Odysseus’s ship, and was transformed into a glowing-eyed, snarling she-dog after her death.

Another claims that she glimpsed her daughter Polyxena’s body as she was taken out of Troy, and that she was transformed into a mad, howling dog then and there. Whatever version you choose, Euripides gives us a harrowing prelude to her madness: a woman amid the ruin of her life, trying desperately to find some scrap of hope that could make the future bearable to her, and desperately failing.

That’s it for this episode. Should you read this? Well, it’s not an easy beach read, that’s for sure. But Euripides is worth making time for. I relied on the Emily Wilson translation in 2016’s The Greek Plays, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm. That’s in verse, which I usually struggle with, but not, it seems, when Emily Wilson is the one doing the versification.

There’s also a good prose edition by Oxford World’s Classics from 2000. That features some good introductory material by Edith Hall and a fine translation by James Morwood. Both these editions are widely available.

For our next episode, we’re going to use Euripides, a great dramatizer of women, as a jumping off point to learn more about the lives of actual women in Ancient Greece. We’ll look at women in the domestic sphere, in religion, and in civic life.

Join me on Sunday, July 13^th – yes, we’re a Sunday show now – for Episode 36: Euripides, The Trojan Women, Part 2: I Was One of Those Girls.

Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.

References and Works Cited:

Allan, Bill. “Discovering a New Euripides Papyrus.” TLS, 16 Oct. 2024, www.the-tls.com/classics/greek/new-euripides-papyrus-essay-bill-allan.

Cioffi, Robert. “Euripides Unbound.” London Review of Books, London Review of Books, 27 Sept. 2024, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n18/robert-cioffi/euripides-unbound.

Euripides, et al. Hecuba ; the Trojan Women ; Andromache. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hall, Edith, and Euripides. Medea and Other Plays, Oxford University Press, USA, 2009, pp. ix–xxxiv.

Lefkowitz, Mary R., et al. The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Modern Library/Random House, 2017.

O’Grady, Eileen. “Unearthed Papyrus Contains Lost Scenes from Euripides’ Plays.” Harvard Gazette, 18 Oct. 2024, www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/unearthed-papyrus-contains-lost-scenes-from-euripides-plays/

Plutarch. “The Parallel Lives: Nicias.” Edited by Bernadotte Perrin, Perseus, Tufts University, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0051%3Achapter%3D29. Accessed 19 June 2025.

The Sicilian Expedition, 413 BC, www.penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/syracuse.html. Accessed 19 June 2025.