CHAPTER 2 Trojan Women

Rosanna Lauriola

“Are you crying, my child? . . . Why are you clutching me with your hands, and clinging to my robe, like a nestling seeking shelter beneath my wings?” (Trojan Women 749–51).1 A child, tender and defenseless like a baby bird, is dragged away from his helpless mother, while hopelessly grasping her dress, which can no longer give him the comfort of motherly protection. The iron law of war cannot grant him the right to live even as a war prisoner. It is a matter of survival and national secu- rity, as strategically the leaders of the winning side would, and do, say. And the mother has just to bear the pain, to keep quiet lest she leave the child indignantly unburied (Trojan Women 727–38). Astyanax and Andromache are the hopeless child and helpless mother of any wartime ever since Euripides penned Trojan Women in 415 BC, in the midst of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). And the Trojan women are all the widows, the mothers, the brides-to be, the sisters, and the daughters who come to bear the heavy burden of the war and its aftermath— above all, but not exclusively, if they belong to the defeated side. Being undoubtedly a play about the horrors and the atrocious effects of war, which are denounced through the vivid picture of the suffering of innocent victims, this Euripidean tragedy, perhaps more than any other, raises fundamen- tal questions about the morality of war, if there is any, and about the capacity of men to take events under control fairly before they spiral out of control. It is, in fact, not simply a tragedy about the horrors of war, for it struggles with, and chal- lenges, the crucial question of human responsibility. Poseidon and Athena blame the Greeks for sacrilege and, in consequence, for their own misfortunes; Hecuba blames the gods and Helen for the fall of her city and, in consequence, her and her family’s misfortunes; Menelaus blames Helen, and Helen blames Aphrodite and Hecuba. . . . Human responsibility certainly lies at the core of any human event, last, but not least, of war and its management. It is an unavoidable mat- ter with which all, conquerors and conquered, ultimately come to deal, although

* I would like to thank Prof. C. Kallendorf (A&M Texas University) who read the very first draft of all the four chapters I contributed to this volume (Trojan Women, Suppliant Women, Medea, and Hippolytus). I am very grateful to him for his valuable feedbacks and constant encouragement. 1 All translations, from any language into English, are mine, unless differently indicated in the footnotes.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004299818_004 Trojan Women 45 both, in a way, are victims. Euripides’ Trojan Women provides a forum to debate this ­complex matter as far as war and its effects are concerned. The responsibil- ity of governments, of communities, and of individuals is certainly important in past and present wars, along with the suffering and the cruel fate of all victims. With war being the tragedy of society, this play has been used, over and over, as a weapon of protest against the waging of war on account of the diversified coun- terparts of the Trojan War that one can identify in any war-context of any time. The setting has in fact been differently interpreted as a concentration camp, a prison cell, or a camp for refugees. Likewise, the main characters have come to mirror the timeless maladies of war: Hecuba and the women of the chorus could symbolize a nation suffering from the impact of war; Helen, the purposelessness of war, or a scapegoat for the community’s sufferings; Astyanax, any innocent, young victim of warmongers, and so forth. It is unfortunately, over and over, an ‘actual’ tragedy. The pain of military con- flicts never ends.

In Literature

Οὐκέτι Τροία (“Troy is no more,” Trojan Women 99) says a resigned Hecuba to whom nothing else is left but tears: her country, her children, her husband, all are gone. With those words, Hecuba, a central figure of Euripides’ Trojan Women, makes her debut on the stage, setting the scenario: Troy has fallen. If the town itself still partially stands, since the Greeks have not yet put it to the torch, its people are gone. Men and warriors are all dead; women and children have been taken as captives and will be enslaved. Troy is indeed no more. Set in the immediate aftermath of the defeat, and portraying the fate of the surviving defeated, this tragedy seals the end of the “myth for all times,” i.e., the story of the Trojan War.2 At the same time, it offers a powerful document of the

2 Easterling (1997) 173. As is well known, Homer only alludes to, but does not cover, the last events of the Trojan story, which are among those that constitute the thematic ground of Euripides’ Trojan Women. The Cyclic Epics of the 8th and 7th centuries BC are the earliest known sources of the ‘after-Iliad’ events. In particular, mention should be made of Arctinus’ Iliou Persis (= “The sack of Troy”) and Lesches’ Mikra Ilias (= “The little Iliad”), which dealt with the burning of the city, the death of Astyanax and Polyxena, and the allotment of Andromache to Pyrrhus: see, e.g., Bowra (1961) 102; Boyle (1994) 17. For a comprehensive commentary on the ‘lost Epics’, including Arctinus’ and Lesches’ poems, see West (2013). In the 6th century BC the lyric poet Stesichorus, too, composed an Iliou Persis: likely based on the epic of Arctinus, it presents some innovations above all in terms of mitigating the emotions and tempering some of the most violent episodes, such as the death of Astyanax: