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    The Trojan Women
    The Trojan Women
    The Trojan Women
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    The Trojan Women

    By Euripides

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    Though little is known for certain of his early life, Euripides was probably born around 460 b.c.e. to the farmer Mnesarchus and his wife Clito, and his studious nature quickly led him to a literary life in Athens. His work sticks out from that of his contemporaries for his attention to the political and social problems around him, although he never held public office. His plays are often ironic, pessimistic, and display radical rejection of classical decorum and rules. "The Trojan Women" is one of Euripides' anti-war plays, set in Troy just after it has been captured by the Greeks in a bitter, ten-year war. The play is not particularly suspenseful, but instead it relies on passages of lyric lamentation in the form of songs by Hecuba and other women who face cruel servitude in Greece. It is a powerful tragedy that emphasizes the sufferings of the innocent victims of war.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781420944884
    Author

    Euripides

    Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. He was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC to his mother, Cleito, and father, Mnesarchus, a retailer who lived in a village near Athens. He had two disastrous marriages, and both his wives—Melite and Choerine (the latter bearing him three sons)—were unfaithful. He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. He became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education. The details of his death are uncertain.

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      Book preview

      The Trojan Women - Euripides

      THE TROJAN WOMEN

      OF EURIPIDES

      TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY GILBERT MURRAY

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-2732-0

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-0419-2

      This edition copyright © 2012

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      THE TROJAN WOMEN

      INTRODUCTORY NOTE

      CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

      THE TROJAN WOMEN

      THE TROJAN WOMEN

      In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music. Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic. It even goes beyond the limited tragic, and hints that beyond the defeat may come a greater glory than will be the fortune of the victors. And thus through its pity and terror it purifies our souls to thoughts of peace.

      Great art has no limits of locality or time. Its tidings are timeless, and its messages are universal. The Trojan Women was first performed in 415 B.C., from a story of the siege of Troy which even then was ancient history. But the pathos of it is as modern to us as it was to the Athenians. The terrors of war have not changed in three thousand years. Euripides had that to say of war which we have to say of it to-day, and had learned that which we are even now learning, that when most triumphant it brings as much wretchedness to the victors as to the vanquished. In this play the great conquest seems to be a great joy and is in truth a great misery. The tragedy of war has in no essential altered. The god Poseidon mourns over Troy as he might over the cities of to-day, when he cries:

      "How are ye blind,

      Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast

      Temples to desolation, and lay waste

      Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie

      The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"

      To the cities of this present day might the prophetess Cassandra speak her message:

      "Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!

      Yet if war come, there is a crown in death

      For her that striveth well and perisheth

      Unstained: to die in evil were the stain!"

      A throb of human sympathy as if with one of our sisters of to-day comes to us at the end, when the city is destroyed and its queen would throw herself, living, into its flames. To be of the action of this play the imagination needs not to travel back over three thousand years of history. It can simply leap a thousand leagues of ocean.

      If ever wars are to be ended, the imagination of man must end them. To the common mind, in spite of all its horrors, there is still something glorious in war. Preachers have preached against it in vain; economists have argued against its wastefulness in vain. The imagination of a great poet alone can finally show to the imagination of the world that even the glories of war are an empty delusion. Euripides shows us, as the centre of his drama, women battered and broken by inconceivable torture—the widowed Hecuba, Andromache with her child dashed to death, Cassandra ravished and made mad—yet does he show that theirs are the unconquered and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality of our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan Women at this moment of the history of the world.

      FRANCIS HOVEY STODDARD.

      May the first, 1915.

      INTRODUCTORY NOTE

      Judged by common standards, the Troädes is far from a perfect play; it is scarcely even a good play. It is an intense study of one great situation, with little plot, little construction, little or no relief or variety. The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a suggestion that in the utterness of night, when all fears of a possible worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory. But the situation itself has at least this dramatic value, that it is different from what it seems.

      The consummation of a great conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans and thanksgivings, the very height of the day-dreams of unregenerate man—it seems to be a great joy, and it is in truth a great misery. It is conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men, after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.

      Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull, but that it is too harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the due

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