The Trojan Women was my next venture into my favorite Greek playwright, Euripides, but it was not without its faults. I am a sucker for Greek tragedy, but The Trojan Women almost felt a little too tragic. However, that in itself, is not inherently a major issue. The Trojan Women is an interesting Greek tragedy in a sense very similar to what made Aeschylus’ The Persians so interesting; it focuses on the often overlooked women of Troy after the sack of Troy, and creates pity and fear by relishing in their miseries. The main plot follows the former Queen Hecuba, wife of the slaughtered Priam, as she interacts with Trojan figures such as Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen, lamenting with them all about how terrible their new lives are as slaves to the Greeks. Eventually, it began to feel a bit artless about how painfully miserable the situation was, and how miserable all the characters were, with no good fortune to be found. There were some repeated lines by some of them trying to cling to hope for the future, but overall, even these lines often came across as very defeatist. More bad stuff even occurs during the play, such as Andromache’s son Astyanax getting thrown off the walls of Troy, which adds to the already overwhelming slog of misery. The only major part that I did enjoy was when Hecuba denounces Helen for going back with Menelaus after Helen blames Aphrodite for forcing her to run away with Paris, since, according to Hecuba, she is blaming the gods for her own immoral actions (which I think is so interesting to see a Classical Greek author point out). 

     However, I still believe that it is very interesting to see how abnormally different this Greek tragedy is compared to others. I referenced Aeschylus’ The Persians as comparable to The Trojan Women, and that is because it follows the defeat of the Persian king Xerxes and the suffering of the Persians, which is odd since the Greeks hated the Trojans (and one would expect Aeschylus to as well, since he fought them himself). However, Aeschylus still writes a narrative about them and their sufferings nonetheless, which is endlessly fascinating. The Trojan Women is similar. The Greeks (obviously) were not as fond of the Trojan heroes as they were of the Greek heroes, but even more surprisingly, did not often relish in the misfortunes of women in their stories, or, at least not as the focal point of pity and fear in tragedy. This point is especially true for playwrights such as Aeschylus and Sophocles, and is another way Euripides generally differs from the two, and another reason why I think, for this modern age’s aesthetic taste buds, Euripides is the best Greek playwright. But I digress: the point is that Euripides writing an entire play which Greeks (mostly men) would watch about the sufferings of women at the hands of men to an endless degree is extreme, even for Euripides. Attempting to understand why Euripides wrote this play then, like why Aeschylus wrote The Persians, is impossible; however, it is nonetheless fascinating that Euripides chose to write this play at all. So while it was not the most fun to read, The Trojan Women is an endlessly fascinating historical artifact for just existing, that may shed some light on who Euripides was as a person as well.