Trojan Women
The Tragic Trojan Women
In Euripides tragedy, Trojan Women, the tragic heroines are the Trojan women, the suffering prisoners of war. Having more than one tragic hero is unusual in Greek drama, and Euripides is the first Athenian dramatist to do so. Euripides, younger than Aeschylus and Sophocles, did not follow Aristotle's formal criteria for a tragedy. The play starts after the Trojan War when the women from the tainted city of Troy, who were once considered noble and aristocratic, are forced into enslavement.
After the capture of Troy, all of the Trojan men are killed, or gone; and all the women and children are captive. The scene is an open space before the partly demolished city. Against the walls are tents, or huts, which temporarily house the captive women. These women prisoners are former nobility, and used to have free will. Against their will, they are forced into slavery, which does not follow Aristotle's criterion of the tragic Hero having the ability to make her own choices. Queen Hecuba, a Trojan woman and sufferer, becomes incensed when Talthybius delivers the message about who her new master is. Suffering Hecuba is enraged when she realizes that undeserving King Agamemnon has chosen to be lord to her pure daughter. She remarks, "Slave woman to that Lacedaemonian wife? My unhappy child! She, Apollo's virgin, blessed in the privilege of the gold- haired god gave her, a life forever unwed?" (247-8). More angry, she is told by Talthybius that Odysseus is her new lord. "Must I? To be given as slave to serve that vile, that slippery man, right's enemy, brute, murderous beast, that mouth of lies and treachery
I am gone, doomed, undone
given the worst lot of all" (282-91)." Queen Hecuba was a good woman, not a villain, and her social position falls from aristocratic to slave-like. Additionally, the poor queen's soliloquy about Odysseus being her new lord makes the reader feel pity and fear and share in her...
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