Euripides' Trojan Women Day 16: Legitimizing Cultural Appropriation

PHRYGIAN MUSIC IN TROJAN WOMEN: Legitimizing Cultural Appropriation

The first stasimon of the Trojan Women is a dramatization of the birth of epic poetry, and a staging of the appropriation of Phrygian music by the Greek tradition. Greek texts show an ambivalent mixture of disparaging and admiring attitudes towards Phrygia, Lydia, and Thrace. This has important consequences for interpreting texts or myths that are set in those regions. The issue of Phrygian song is crucial in the Trojan Women.

                In the Trojan Women, Trojan characters link the disruption of Phrygian traditions of song and dance performance to the arrival of the Greeks and their music, which causes the violent end of their civilization. The chorus  of Trojan women  frames the  narration as a  piece  of  ‘Greek’  epic poetry that substitutes the Phrygian tradition. Trojan characters in the drama express the awareness of the end of Phrygian music and of the emergence of Greek poetry. This self-effacing move of the chorus can be seen to legitimize the Greek appropriation of Trojan subject matter.

8 Phrygian songs (Frugia melea) are mentioned in the Trojan Women (545) as a thing of the past. In the past there were occasions for public performance: this tradition is now interrupted. This is a major theme in the play; characters and the chorus make often references to it. The text mentions songs for the gods and pannychides, nightlong festivals with song and dance (Tro. 1071-73). The songs of Troy were part of a regular, well-organized civic life, and were well structured; in the play, we find a series of distorted fragments of this tradition. According to Damon, the most influential fifth century musical theorist, “styles of music are nowhere altered without change in the greatest laws of the city”(Plato, Rep. 424 c).S The Trojan Women represents the converse of this statement: that a breakdown of society cannot but entail a breakdown in musical tradition. In the play, ritual patterns of song performance are constantly re-staged and disrupted. Wedding songs and ritual lament (threnoi) are conspicuously distorted. The  most  notable  instance  is  Cassandra’s  wedding  song. 

          The first stasimon of the Trojan Women is explicitly presented as the first occasion the women have for singing after the interruption during the fall of Troy. Note that the parodos is not presented as a song: it is a dialogue with Hecuba, the meter used is lyric anapaests, the most regular lyric meter, and remarkably similar to recited anapaests. More importantly, the chorus members do not present their lines in the parodos as a song: as characters in the play they sing, but they are not aware that they are singing, and make no reference to that. The first stasimon is the first song of the Trojan Women after the fall of Troy. It begins where they were forced to stop. It takes over from the interrupted song of the Trojans that is narrated within the stasimon itself. But in the meantime, the Trojan voice has changed. It has acquired a Greek tone. The last song of the chorus in Troy was distinctively Phrygian. But the voice that takes up the interrupted song of the Trojans is distinctively Greek.

When the Trojan prisoners start narrating the end of Phrygian music, they allude to a Greek tradition that post-dates  the  ‘actual’  date  of  the  events.  A  ‘new’  poetry,  a  new  mousike is given birth from the destruction of the Trojan city with its interrupted music. We do not know whether the Phrygian harmonia was used at the beginning of the stasimon. If it was, Euripides was offering a characteristic example of cultural colonization: the Homeric phrases made the exotic, conquered tune into a Greek one.

If the Trojan culture is annihilated, and the Trojans themselves recognize that the fame of their city will disappear, then Greek tragedy can step in. This explains the very obvious pro-Trojan stance of the tragedy. The Phrygians of the 5th century were seen as ignorant slaves, and therefore cannot be proper heirs to that tradition. If Phrygian music and Phrygian instruments are to survive at all, it will be in Greek culture; they will be played in Athenian tragedies. Greek tragedy has the strength to incorporate elements from the Phrygian musical and ritual tradition, or at least elements that passed for Phrygian to the eyes and ears of the audience. Tragedy puts on stage the violent end of a civilization, the birth of a new subject matter for Greek song, and the acquisition of an Eastern musical heritage. By adopting a Trojan point of view, tragedy can speak up for the defeated. This is the most authoritative way to achieve the ultimate appropriation of the Phrygian tradition: to speak up for the vanished barbarians of the past.

x

Euripides Trojan Women Day 15: The Trojan Trilogy (lost)

Euripides’ “Trojan Trilogy”

There are reasons why there is no “action” in Euripides’ Trojan Women except for things to get worse. No other extant play is set at the fall of a city; although plenty of tragic cities may be under threat, none of them, not even Aeschylus’ Persepolis, is about to be wiped off the map as is Euripides’ Troy. The play is also exceptional in that it has no messenger speech; it has the largest number of half-line exchanges in the extant corpus(called ˜half-stichomythia); it is the only extant play to end on a lyric, sung exchange and in lyric meter rather than the iambic meter that represents dramatic speech. It also forms the last part of what may have been a fairly innovative trilogy, which we know enough about to provide some interesting context. What we know of all the lost plays is pieced together from quotes by later authors referring to or even summarizing plays, and the occasional discovery of a fragment on papyrus.

Tragedy had by 415 moved away from the trilogy form of which Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the outstanding example, and it is only rarely that we can detect connections among the groups of plays that later dramatists submitted to the festival. But Trojan Women comes at the end of what is almost certainly a Trojan trilogy,” comprising the plays Alexander (another name for Paris), Palamedes (the name of a Greek warrior) and finally Trojan Women. While reconstruction of these plays is difficult, scholars concur on the broad lines. The first play, Alexander opened with Kassandra prophesying the downfall of Troy at the hands of Paris and recalling how she prophesied the same outcome when Hecuba was pregnant with Paris. Hecuba dreamed she gave birth to a flaming torch that set fire to the entire world and was told by the Delphic oracles to put the baby to death. Since the baby was not put to death, but exposed, he was “inevitably “rescued and raised to manhood. During the course of the play the baby, now grown, comes to Troy to take part in athletic contests and, outrageously, wins, defeating the sons of the royal house. Hecuba moves from lamenting her lost child to plotting the murder of the upstart commoner, which is obviated when his identity is made known.

     The second play, Palamedes, moves us straight from the early years of Paris to the height of the Trojan War. Set in the Greek camp, it concerns internal strife rather than hostilities against Trojans. Palamedes is the inventor of numerous benefits to the human community, such as writing, but Odysseus bears a grudge against him and concocts false accusations that get him executed by his own side. Since the final play is Trojan Women, set at the very end of the war, no play of this unusual trilogy deals with the war itself on the territory staked out by the Homeric epic poems, and to that extent it may be considered slightly off-kilter and decentered. Critics have commented that the trilogy as a whole also sheds a different kind of light on Trojan Women. 

            Pursuing the issues both of formal innovation and of relation to its trilogy, note that the opening of this play is remarkably like the ending of many others.The way in which the gods appear and make dispositions for the future, which only come to fruition after the end of the dramatic action, is exactly what one might expect from the ending of a Euripidean play. Overall the play starts at the end and cannot move forward from there; a plot without plot development, it is a play of enforced inaction for both the women and the dramatist. Trojan Women does not seem to work through the consequences of the previous dramas as do other surviving ˜third” plays like Aeschylus’ Eumenides or Seven Against Thebes.

          Although there are only rarely specific correspondences among the three plays (two of which of course are only reconstructions from fragments), there is at least one recurrent theme, the death of the innocent, and within this theme the thwarted death of Paris can render the death of Astyanax more comprehensible, because it is undertaken to avoid further disaster. Overall too, the high-octane atmosphere of the first two plays makes it more appropriate, in terms of pacing, that Trojan Women should eschew pretty much anything that counts as action.

Euripides' Trojan Women Day 14: Historical reception of Hecuba vs. TW

TROJAN WOMEN VS HECUBA

Let’s consider the historical reception of two plays by Euripides, the Hecuba, which he wrote about 424 BCE, and The Trojan Women from 415.

 Both focus on Hecuba and deal with exactly the same mythic material: the sufferings of the queen and of the other Trojan women in the few days immediately after the fall of Troy and before the enslaved captives embark with their new masters, the departing Greek victors. But if the contents of the two plays are similar, their construction is very different.

Hecuba combines two stories from the fall of Troy, both involving the sufferings of its last queen, Hecuba. First her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed by the Greeks to the dead Achilles. Then she learns that her youngest son Polydorus, who had been entrusted for safekeeping to the Thracian king Polymestor, has instead been treacherously murdered by him. Hecuba avenges herself upon Polymestor by blinding him and killing his children; at the end it is foretold that she will be transformed into a dog. The two stories are tightly knitted together not only by significant similarities and contrasts of theme and tone but also by specific circumstances of plot: for it is only when a Trojan handmaid goes to the sea to get water to wash the dead Polyxena that she discovers the dead Polydorus – Hecuba’s prolonged mistake, seeing the shrouded corpse and mistaking it first for one dead daughter and then for another one rather than recognizing it as her dead son, not only creates a dramatic irony that increases the pathos of her suffering but also underlines the intricate construction of the plot.

 If Hecuba focuses on the queen’s sufferings and actions, and builds a carefully unified dramatic structure out of first her misery and then her revenge, Trojan Women by contrast presents a set of tableaux of suffering and does not have a tightly knit plot line. Trojan Women portrays the fall of Troy from the point of view of the defeated: given that all of the Trojan men have been slain by the Greek victors, it is their women – mothers, daughters, wives – who can now alone give voice to the suffering of the city. After a divine prologue, in which Poseidon and Athena set aside their opposition during the Trojan War and amicably negotiate the destruction of the victorious Greeks for their sacrilege during the sack of the city, the play then moves to a purely human level of unrelieved distress focused above all on Hecuba and her family. In contrast to the tragedy Hecuba, here the woman who had ruled Troy, and with her the defeated Trojan women and children, are deprived not only of the act, but even of the bare hope, of vengeance. Amid the laments of the chorus of anonymous Trojan captives, the various members of Hecuba's family are assigned as slaves or concubines to their future Greek masters; the prophetess Cassandra exults over the death of Agamemnon which she can foresee; Hector’s widow Andromache announces that Polyxena has been sacrificed to the dead Achilles; Andromache’s young son Astyanax is carried off to be killed by being hurled down from the city’s walls. After Helen debates with Menelaus and Hecuba to what degree she is to be blamed for what has happened, finally the corpse of little Astyanax is brought on stage and mourned, and Hecuba and the remaining Trojan women leave to sail off with Odysseus, to whom she has been assigned.

 We do not know how Hecuba fared in the dramatic competition when it was first produced, but The Trojan Women was evidently a failure: Euripides came in second that year to the obscure playwright Xenocles – a scandal in the eyes of Aelian, who reports this. A few months before the play was produced, the Athenians had captured the small Greek island of Melos and slaughtered all the adult men and enslaved all the women and children; it is difficult not to see Euripides' play, with its extended reflection on the piteous fate of a defeated city and its people, as being colored by that well-known recent event, and, despite the facts that this was only one of four plays he produced that year and that Euripides lost in the competition at the dramatic festivals so many times that we tend to seek explanations not for his many defeats but for his few triumphs, one cannot help wondering whether this play’s failure might not have been due in part to the displeasure of the Athenians at not only being reminded, sharply and unpleasantly, of that incident but also at hearing the divine announcement, in the play’s beginning, of the imminent punishment of the Greek victors, which could easily be interpreted as an only slightly veiled warning against the Athenians themselves.

Throughout antiquity thereafter, Hecuba was much more popular than The Trojan Women, as evinced by quotations and allusions by later authors and by papyri (at least 10 of Hecuba vs. only a couple of The Trojan Women). Nonetheless, during the Imperial period both plays were selected among the ten canonical plays, and so both have survived intact. Why The Trojan Women was made one of the select plays is hard to guess; perhaps it was chosen in order to strengthen further the already substantial group of Trojan tragedies (also represented by Andromache, Hecuba, and Rhesus), next to the smaller ones on Thebes (Phoenician Women, Bacchae), Argos (Orestes), Athens (Hippolytus), Corinth (Medea), and Thessaly (Alcestis). Be that as it may, the insertion of The Trojan Women into the group of select plays certainly did help to secure its survival and influence alongside that of Hecuba. Thus the Latin dramatists Ennius, in his tragedy Hecuba, and Pacuvius, in his tragedy Ilione, seem to have taken Hecuba as their model; while The Trojan Women seems to have inspired Roman tragedies by Ennius (Andromache) and Accius (Astyanax), both lost, but also Seneca's Troades (Trojan Women), containing many close echoes of Euripides' play along with some others from his Hecuba, which survives and was widely read during the Renaissance.

          In the Middle Ages the receptions of the two plays diverged once again. Hecuba was included in the so-called Byzantine triad together with Orestes and The Phoenician Women; as a result, it is transmitted by hundreds of medieval manuscripts and is equipped with very full ancient and medieval commentaries. By contrast, only three medieval manuscripts transmit The Trojan Women and the ancient and medieval commentaries on it are much more modest. The mediaeval predominance of Hecuba continued into the Renaissance. The fact that Hecuba’s title is alphabetically the first in the Byzantine triad meant that it was usually the first play of Euripides to be read in medieval Byzantium as well as in the West during the Renaissance. As early as the 14th century, the first part of the Greek play was accompanied by an interlinear Latin translation, intended to make the play more accessible, that scholars attribute to Leonzio Pilato, who taught Greek to Petrarch and Boccaccio; and a number of other Latin translations survive, starting in the 15th century and culminating in Erasmus’ successful metrical version. In the same century, Latin and then vernacular translations began to proliferate; and by the 16th century Hecuba was the most translated and imitated Greek play of all. Euripides’ play was especially admired for its demonstration of the mutability of fortune, for its careful dramatic construction, for the polished eloquence of its speeches, and for its excessive violence. For the authors and audiences of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies, Hecuba was a particularly compelling study of the nature and limits of vengeance. So too, the sacrifice of Polyxena fascinated many European painters starting in the 17th century (Pietro da Cortona, before 1625; Nicolas Pouusin, ca. 1645-50; Giovanni Francesco Romanelli; Luca Giordano; Giovanni Battista Pittoni).

The traces of reception of The Trojan Women in this period are scant. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance Euripides’ Trojan Women was largely overshadowed by his Hecuba (and by Seneca’s Trojan Women), But things have been different in modern times. Already in the middle of the 19th century, Hector Berlioz based the first two acts of his opera Les Troyennes (1856-59) not only, unsurprisingly, upon Virgil’s Aeneid but also, innovatively, upon The Trojan Women. And since the mid-20^th-century, the experience of the horrors of war, along with changes in dramatic taste, have led to a remarkable resurgence in this play's popularity, and in the past decades it has become – astonishingly – the second most frequently staged of all Greek tragedies, certainly overshadowing Hecuba. The play has been successfully adapted by such authors as Jean-Paul Sartre (The Trojan Women, 1965), Suzuki Tadashi (1974), Hanoch Levin (The Lost Women of Troy, 1984), Andrei Serban (1974/1996; with music by Elizabeth Swados), Charles Mee (n.d.), and Ellen McLaughlin (2008). It has also been the subject of notable films by such directors as the Mexican Sergio Véjar (Las Troyanas, 1963) and the Greek Michael Cacoyannis (The Trojan Women, 1971, starring Kathryn Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and Irene Papas). In most modern versions, allusions to current political events, perhaps already implicit in the Greek original, are made fully explicit and the horror of Euripides’ play is, if anything, heightened even further.

       By contrast, at the beginning of the 19th century Hecuba entered a period of prolonged disparagement and neglect. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s influential Vienna lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature (1808) established a view of the play as the worst tragedy by the worst Greek tragedian – indeed as the worst surviving Greek tragedy of all – that dominated for more than a century. The play’s portrayal of unrelieved suffering, its lyric excesses, the balanced rhetoric of its speeches, and its claustrophobic focus on Hecuba were regarded as intolerable weaknesses. It required considerable changes in Classical scholarship, in modern drama, and not least in our sense of our world as a whole, changes characteristic of the second half of the 20th century, before Hecuba could come back into its own. Only recently has this tragedy begun to recover its prominence, both in the estimation of scholars (especially philosophers) and as a dramatic force in the theater – and largely because of the very same features that 19th century readers had scorned.

          The greater popularity of Hecuba from antiquity through the Renaissance is certainly connected with its inclusion among the Byzantine triad, but probably also reflected a wide-spread fascination with revenge and a taste for well constructed dramatic plots. The contrast with the preference for The Trojan Women over the past two centuries is quite remarkable and cries out for some kind of explanation, at least a speculative one. Must we conclude that contemporary audiences are much less interested in finely shaped plots and in the bloody revenge of those who have suffered than in the repeated representation of hopeless suffering itself?

          There is something to be said for this view. And yet broadening our focus beyond just these two plays suggests that it cannot be the whole story. For one thing, the most popular Euripidean tragedy on the stage today is Medea, more so even than The Trojan Women, and Medea certainly displays the bloody revenge of someone who has suffered. So why is Medea such a success today and Hecuba not? And would it really not be too These are the kinds of questions that reception studies can raise and towards whose answer they can surely provide an important contribution. I conclude tentatively with a few suggested answers of my own. In the contrast between Medea and Hecuba, it is surely crucial that Medea kills her own children while Hecuba kills someone else’s: Medea’s suffering extends beyond what Jason and other men have done to her and includes, even worse, what she does to herself and those she loves. This makes for a far more complex, powerful, and disturbing effect on the viewer. And the quasi-forensic trial scene between Hecuba and Polymestor at the end of Hecuba certainly corresponded to ancient tastes but seems inevitably rather frigid to ours – can Polymestor really be suffering so atrociously, we think, and can Hecuba really be so furious, if they can still engage in these legalistic niceties? 

 As for The Trojan Women, the opportunity to make allegorical or even explicit reference to contemporary political events has certainly been a crucial factor in its success. So too, the extraordinary lyric quality of the play enables it to create a theatrical space for public mourning of the dead that is often lacking in other cultural sectors of our modern Western world. In the end it is perhaps Euripides’ minutely controlled construction of the plot of Hecuba that lessens its pathos for modern audiences, and what can be misunderstood as a loss of formal control in The Trojan Women but in fact is calibrated with great care and precision, that makes this latter play so appealing to modern audiences.

Euripides' Trojan Women, Day 13: Rapid Exchanges in Song

One of the many ways in which Trojan Women is exceptional is that it has the largest number of half-line exchanges in the extant corpus. In tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in hemistichs (in hemistichomythia). The record breaking exchange begins with Andromache’s entrance in a cart, holding her baby son and sitting amid the spoils of war, namely the armor of her slain husband Hector.

     The dialogue is actually a lyric duet (577-607) where each speaker partly responds to what her interlocutor has said, and partly pursues her own line of thought. These utterances, so falteringly articulated by Euripides, dramatically indicate a degree of despair on the part of the women where words are made to seem in danger breaking down altogether, so great is their grief. The meter is syncopated iambic then dactylic.

Here is the E.P. Coleridge translation, which in is the Public Domain.

Andromache
My Achaean masters are leading me away.

Hecuba
Ah me!

Andromache
Why do you in note of woe utter the dirge that is mine?

Hecuba
Alas—

Andromache
For these sorrows—

Hecuba
[580] O Zeus—

Andromache
And for this calamity.

Hecuba
O my children!

Andromache
Our day is past.

Hecuba
Joy is gone, Troy is gone.

Andromache
Unhappy!

Hecuba
For my gallant sons

Andromache
Alas!

Hecuba
Alas indeed, for my

Andromache
[585] Misery!

Hecuba
Piteous the fate

Andromache
Of our city,

Hecuba
Smouldering in the smoke.

Andromache
Come to me, my husband, c!

Hecuba
Ah, hapless wife! you call on my son who lies in the tomb.

Andromache
[590] Your wife's defender!

Hecuba
Oh, you, who before made the Achaeans grieve, eldest of the sons I bore to Priam, take me to your rest in Hades' halls!

Andromache
[595] These great griefs—

Hecuba
Unhappy one, bitter these woes to bear.

Andromache
Our city ruined—

Hecuba
And sorrow to sorrow added.

Euripides' Trojan Women, Day 12: Choral Synesthesia

The Night Troy Burned: Euripides’ Choral Synesthesia

First Stasimon 511-567

I have transliterated all the Greek words so you can try your tongue at pronouncing them!

          As eyewitnesses, the Chorus sings and dances describing the night Troy fell with sensuous, evocative language. Scenes of false jubilation contrast with the devastation caused by the secret vanguard inside the great wooden horse.  The sight of the gold-decked horse is encapsulated in the single and unique compound chruseophalaron,  lit. “with golden cheek pieces of the horse’s head harness.”; in the sinister ship’s hull used to compare the shape and color of the horse; in the bright torch flares glowing in the dark, expressed in the oxymoron malainan aiglan “black gleam” and in the “terrified hands” of children, cheiros eptoemenos, clutching at their mothers’ dress. Sound is evoked in the description of pipes playing (544) thudding feet ( 546) and song (547) as well as in the bold image at 555-6 “a bloody shout possessed the city.” Texture is stressed in a number of epithets suggesting the material composition of things- “the mountain pinewood” (533), the “polished ambush” (544), the circling ropes of spun flax” (538) and the stone temple floor (540).  The senses blend and overlap: the sound of thudding feet and singing cuts through the darkness with intermittent gleams of torchlight,  so that sound and darkness and light become indistinguishable. Thus, a shout is described with a word that also connotes the redness of blood, phoinia (555), and an abstract word “ambush” (534) is given a tangible, textural adjective to suggest the polished wood in which it is hidden.

          The Greeks’ brutal decapitation of the Trojan men is evoked in two words, karatomos eremia “headless desolation”, while the Trojan women, taken as so much loot to breed sons to Greek men are called neanidon stephanon…..Helladi kourotrophon, a phrase so condensed it is almost untranslatable without using more words, “ a crowning-prize-of-young-women to-breed-sons-for-Greece.”

Next: Andromache enters with her baby on board chariot.

Euripides' Trojan Women Day 11: Cassandra Predicts the Odyssey

Here is my translation of Trojan Woman 436-443. In steady iambic trimeter Cassandra predicts the Odyssey.

Cassandra: 

You say that my mother will come to Odysseus’ hall.

But what of Apollo’s words, interpreted/understood by me,

That say she shall die here?  I will not reproach her

By mentioning the rest. Odysseus, poor wretch,

Little knows what he must still go through.

My troubles and those of Troy will seem to him

Positively golden compared to his own.

After spending ten full years, on top of those he spent here,

He will arrive alone in his own country.

…(there is a lacuna here)

Where terrible Charybdis lurks in a narrow channel

Between the rocks, and the mountain-dwelling cannibal Cyclops.

The Ligurian Circe who changes men into swine,

The shipwreck on the salt sea and the desire

For the lotus and the sacred oxen of the sun,

Whose bloody flesh will emit a bitter sound for Odysseus *

To cut the story short, he will go down to Hades alive

And after escaping the sea, he will find countless troubles at home.

·        This refers to the ill-omened {pikran} sound of cooking flesh, because after this feast he loses all his men).

Euripides' Trojan Women, Day 10: Cassandra acts the present and narrates the future.

EPISODE ONE: ENTER CASSANDRA

As much as Trojan Women reminds me of Beckett, it also reminds me of Brecht. There is framing and distancing and intellect and irony and a stark contrast between speech and song. In the first episode, we will see all of that.

Hecuba’s anxiety in this short scene between herself and the herald Talthybius is stressed by the fact that she is given lyric lines while he speaks in prosaic iambic trimeters. (Euripides does this often, as in the death scene of the Alcestis, where the dying mother and wife speaks in lyric lines while Admetus, slow and uncomprehending, utter trimeters. Only when Alcestis has fainted does Admetus go into lyric himself. ) Talthybius does not understand why anyone should want a half-crazed priestess like Cassandra, nor can he understand why it is not an honor to be ordered to serve a king. Talthybius does not understand much.

Running from her tent with two torches, Cassandra sings a lyric monody in a mixture of dochmaic metre, resolved iambics and glyconics. Dochmaics are associated with high excitement. Cassandra’s entrance song, for the audience who knows of her impending doom, is a horrible conflation of a wedding hymn and a funeral dirge. Cassandra, like her mother before her, makes a connection between the song and dance she now performs and the dancing of happier days, providing a meaningful and traditional contrast between past and present: “Raise your foot on high, lead on the dance—Euan, Euoi!—as in the happiest times when my father was alive” (Trojan Women 325-328). Since the torch was used at Bacchanals as well as weddings, and Hecuba calls Cassandra’s raving state mainas ( 349)  a word used of Bacchic revelers)  Cassandra uses Bacchic cries,  “Euhan Euhoi “ (326). Talthybius mixes up Apollo and Dionysus when he says the god made her mind foggy.

There is a stroke of genius here in portraying madness as normality gone wrong. Or rather inappropriately applied in the right circumstance  this would be a perfectly natural song for a Trojan princess to sing on her wedding day. Perhaps her madness protects her from seeing her fate as it really is, or perhaps it is what gives her the insight to be tragically sarcastic.  Cassandra is a virgin priestess and has never contemplated marriage in her future, which increases the irony, if that’s possible.

In the calmer, spoken iambic portions which follow, ( 353ff) she is actually quite lucid, but in her prophetess mode. This seems somehow reversed. In Aeschylus (Agamemnon) Cassandra’s prophesying comes in a fit of trance, whereas for Euripides’ Cassandra the fit is over when the accurate fortune telling begins with clarity and normal speech patterns. She makes an insightful observation about how the Greeks have lost more than they took from the Trojans, lost ten years away from their homelands and loved ones, while Trojans stayed together as families to the end.  The dead Greeks will be buried in a foreign land, the Trojans at home. Cassandra takes legitimate pride in knowing she will ultimately defeat Agamemnon and avenge Troy by pushing Clytemnestra over the edge so that she and her lover kill the King. It doesn’t matter to Cassandra that she will also die, because she gets her revenge and does. as a mere woman, a mere victim, something even her brother Hector could not do.  Posthumous fame  seems to be a strong source of consolation to the defeated Trojans.  Without the war, Hector’s bravery “would have escaped notice.”

Cassandra now goes into trochaic tetrameters. The change in meter brings emphasis to her closing lines which spell out more clearly than before the horror of her own death and that of Agamemnon. Cassandra creates a graphic image of her death as she does in Aeschylus (Ag. 1260ff.)  She discards the  marks of her office as a priestess of Apollo in both plays, throwing them down in anger in Aeschylus, but in Euripides, saying goodbye to the god and letting the wind carry her garland way gently.

Cassandra herself is not deluded either about what her “marriage” means; she proceeds to foretell the murders that await them upon arrival in Argos. Cassandra takes comfort in the knowledge that she will not be unavenged: “For if there is a Loxias, in me the renowned lord of the Achaeans Agamemnon will find a more disastrous marriage than Helen’s” (εἰ γὰρ ἔστι Λοξίας,/Ἑλένης γαμεῖ με δυσχερέστερον γάμον/ὁ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν κλεινὸς Ἀγαμέμνων ἄναξ 356-358). Her death is the Trojans’ victory: “I will come bearing victory to the dead after destroying the house of Atreus, by whom we have been cut {144|145} down” (ἥξω δ' ἐς νεκροὺς νικηφόρος καὶ δόμους πέρσασ' Ἀτρειδῶν, ὧν ἀπωλόμεσθ' ὕπο 460-461). Her predictions are not confined to the fate of Agamemnon; she also prophesies the wanderings of Odysseus (431-443). In this way Cassandra, like Athena and Poseidon, looks beyond the confines of the play to the disasters that await the Greeks upon their departure from Troy.

Therefore Cassandra, too, is the quintessential captive woman, and in her bridal song come together many important themes. Like Polyxena in the Hecuba, she stands for the young Trojan women who will never have marriages, but who will instead become captive concubines and slaves. She is also set up as the counterpart of Helen. Her “marriage” to Agamemnon will bring death and destruction from Troy to Argos, just as Helen and Paris brought destruction from Greece to Troy. Cassandra perhaps does not lament, but she does get her revenge.

     Tomorrow I will translate Cassandra’s predictions for Odysseus (a summary of the Odyssey, which hasn’t happened yet.) The villainous portrait of Odysseus adds to the general image of barbarous Greeks. Odysseus was particularly unscrupulous in his false accusation of Palamedes in the previous play (lost) of the trilogy. Talthybius later says that it was Odysseus who counseled that Astyanax should die!

Euripides Day 9: The Rhythms of Tragedy in one easy lesson, and why.

          The evolution of Greek tragedy in translation has followed a clear trend in the past fifty years: Lines of dialogue have become shorter and less metrically uniform, as the goal of producing a “dramatic poem” (the phrase comes from the foreword to Oxford’s “Greek Tragedy in New Translations” series) has predominated over that of drama per se. The increasing ratio of white space to print, seen in the works of poet-translators like Anne Carson, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, has reached a new extreme with Bryan Doerries’ 2015 All That You’ve Seen Here is God, where most lines of Sophocles and Aeschylus are shortened to three or four syllables. This trend has gone largely undiscussed despite the enormous change taking place in a modern reader’s experience of Greek tragedy. As lines have shortened and lost uniformity, looking more like choral odes than dialogue, the lyric and emotional quality of the plays has crowded out the more discursive side that is best expressed in the iambic trimeter lines of the original, their functional “blank verse” as is iambic pentameter in Shakespeare and Milton.

          In tragedy, Meter is the rhythm of speech and song. The more you get into it, the more you feel how the meters are in touch with the feelings of the characters and their actions, bringing emphasis and tone to their words. I am going to try and explain meters in tragedy simply, but there will be some vocabulary, ( about 1% of the vocabulary of Greek prosody as a whole!)
First thing: Ancient Greek was a pitch-accented language and its metrical rhythms are based on patterns of long(_) and short(u) vowels. Modern Greek has lost many of the diphthongs and vowels that in ancient Greek provide the actual rhythm of the lines.
( Ioticization : in Modern Greek the letters ι, ει, η, υ, υι (rare), οι, are all pronounced [i]! (ee!)

          Because English speakers use stress instead of pitch or length for scanning poetry the convention is to stress the first long vowel in each foot, which in Epic and much Lyric poetry is usually the first syllable. I like to try to imitate vowel length rhythm by drawing out the long beats, which are always the value of two short beats. Lots of long beats slow down the pace, and lots of short beats speed things up.

Iambic trimeter ( for spoken dialogue) and dactylic hexameter (Epic) are not easy to scan, but much easier than the wide variety Lyric meters used in solo “arias” and “choral odes,” which carry intense emotions and choral dance movement in contrast to the “verse-speak” of dialogue. Here are English examples of iambic trimeter.
“I love the jocund dance,
The softly breathing song…” (Blake)
The 1948 poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke uses the trimeter:
...We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

To make them memorable, advertising slogans often fall into iambic trimeter:
“The best a man can get.” Or “Be all that you can be.” Even “ It’s finger lickin’ good.”

     The typical structure of an Ancient Greek tragedy is a series of alternating dialogue and choral lyric sections. (There are exceptions, and technical divisions naturally do not explain intellectual and emotional “soft power” aspects of a great Greek tragedy.) The dialogue sections are in typically iambic trimeters or, less often, trochaic tetrameters (more on these two meters below)—but sometimes there are other meters in dialogue sections, such as short subsections in meters associated with Lyric poetry. The Choral lyric sections are found in a variety of traditional meters represented in the surviving Ancient Greek lyric poetry such as Pindar’s victory odes and the lyric poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus.

Dialogue:Iambic trimeter
Most used for spoken dialogue. The most basic pattern is u_ u_(short-long short-long, or da-DUM-da-DUM) repeated three times in the line, but there is some variation: for example the first short can be long instead (the first syllable of a Greek iamb being capable of being either long or short, is technically termed “anceps” (a Latin word meaning “facing two directions”, or undecided), and sometimes two shorts can take the place of a long. A beginner who attempts to scan each iambic trimeter (or other meter) encountered will soon get the feeling for the rhythm.
Catalectic: trochaic tetrameter
Another important speechverse is the catalectic (catalectic, meaning a syllable is left off at the end) trochaic tetrameter. A Greek trochaic metrum has the form _u_X (long-short-long-anceps, DUM-da-DUM-da, or sometimes DUM-da-DUM-DUM). The trochaic tetrameter is a close relative of the iambic trimeter.

Chorus: anapests or spondees
The parodos is often delivered, at least for a stretch, in anapests, with basic metrum pattern uu_ (short-short-long, or da-da-DUM). Routinely dactyls (long-short-short, or DUM-da-da) or Spondees (long-long, or DUM-DUM) are substituted for anapests in the anapestic dimeter (line, or colon, of two anapests), the typical meter of the Chorus’ entrance (if not the whole parodos, the first part of the parodos).
Aeolic meters: choriambus, glyconic, pherecratean
Another important metrum is the choriambus _ u _ (long-short-short-long, or DUM-da-da-DUM) which seems to me a wonderful rhythm to dance to. It is a major fixture in most of the Aeolic meters of Greek tragedy and Aeolic lyric poetry generally.

That’s enough for now, back to Trojan Women tomorrow, when I will highlight some of the ways Euripides uses rhythms and the contrast and context of speech versus song.

Day 8: Euripides the Posthumously Popular Avant-Garde Composer

Euripides the Posthumously Popular Avant-Garde Composer

The latter decades of the fifth century saw marked changes in musical sounds, practices, and contexts of performance. Contemporary observers, as well as later conservative critics such as Plato, characterized the changes as a musical revolution. The theatrical genres of dithyramb and tragedy were the focus of the stylistic changes that we now refer to as the “New Music,” and Euripides, along with Agathon and the notorious musician Timotheus of Miletus were its foremost advocates and practitioners.

An anecdote in Satyrus’ Life of Euripides attests to a professional association of Euripides with Timotheus :“When Timotheus was [being scorned } by the Greeks for his musical innovation and was so deeply dispirited that he had decided to kill himself, Rip alone ridiculed the audiences in turn, and perceiving how great a composer Timotheus was in his sphere of art, he encouraged him with the most reassuring words and even collaborated with him in composing the prelude to his “The Persians” with the result that Timotheus took the prize and ceased to be rejected. The account may be biographically unreliable----Euripides’ relationship with Tim may have even been one of rivalry rather than cooperation---but the story indicates the way that the two avant-garde practitioners were linked in popular imagination.

The penchant for novelty so strikingly demonstrated by Euripides in his verbal style, meters, and plots extended to the music he composed for his tragedies.  This is confirmed by the evidence of Aristophanes, who throughout his comedies engages in ceaseless poetic rivalry with Rip, parodying, imitating, and citing his scenarios, plots and expressions ( the comic poet Cadmus  euripidaristophanizein, “to Euripid-Aristophanize” to characterize the verbal virtuosity evident in both poets.)

Aristophanes’ comic parody of Euripides extended to imitation and critiquing his perceived musical excesses. In Frogs of 405 BC Aristophanes put “Euripides” onstage I the underworld ( he had recently died in Macedon) competing with Aeschylus for the prize of tragedy, judged by Dionysus in his comic incarnation. In a passage in which “Aeschylus” contrasts his own decourous musical practices with those of “Rip” the main criticism he levels at his rival is that he is indiscriminate in the way he mixes high and low genres of song:

This fellow takes his material from all over: whore songs,

Drinking songs by Meletus, Carian pipe tunes,

Dirges and dances. I’ll demonstreate it soon enough---

Someone bring my lyre! Mind you,  who needs

A lyre for this? Where’s that woman with the potsherds,

The one who plays on them. Oh Muse of Euripides, come here.

You’re the right person to sing these songs! ( Frogs 1301-1307.)

There is plenty of later evidence on the music of Euripides being, like his plays, more popular after his death then during his lifetime. There is that famous story, related in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, how knowledge of Euripidean lyric was instrumental in effecting the release from slavery of Greek prisoners in Sicily; how starving soldiers received food and drink in exchange for singing what songs of his they knew; how the Caunians allowed a ship pursued by pirates to harbour in their port after finding out that the men on board were well versed in Euripidean ἄιcματα (cf. Plut. Nic. 29.2-3). Whether or not all this is true it would be impossible to say. But the popular appeal of his songs is unquestionably confirmed by papyri containing the remains of Hellenistic anthologies of Euripidean lyrics and references to ‘concert performances’ of his songs in non-theatrical contexts.

 Pseudo-Psellus On Tragedy 5.39 provides the following account of how Euripidean melody diverged technically from that of earlier tragedians: “The music of early tragedy uses the unmixed enharmonic genus and a genus created by mixing the enharmonic and diatonic genera, but none of the tragedians until Euripides appears to have made use of the chromatic genus. The character of this genus is soft.” We aren’t sure what he means by “soft.”

Of the modes (tonoi) ancient tragedy mainly uses what they called the Dorian and Mixolydian the former because it is suited to solemnity  the latter because it is associated with mourning ( See my earlier blog post, Lament 101. But tragedy also used the so-called free or loose modes (harmoniai) the Ionian and “the free Lydian.” Euripides seems to have been the first to use a large range of notes and wide interval skips: this style of music was called “gapped” by ancient musicians. Think Eric Dolphy if he played an aulos.

          The modes were in simple terms,  systems of tuning analogous to modern scales, although special modes were thought to have almost ethical effects. The so called “genera” modified the effects of these “scales,” altering the pattern of intervals, like harmonic versus melodic minor. So what did they mean by enharmonic, diatonic and chromatic?  The enharmonic, which was considered the oldest and “original” genus, made use of fine pitch differences ( i.e. quarter-tones). Toward the end of the 5^th century  music composed in this style was considered increasingly old-fashioned, and was giving way to melodies created with less subtle half-tones (for the chromatic genus) and whole tones (the diatonic genus) . The diatonic genus was felt to impart a “sweeter” sound  that was heard as gratifying to vulgar tastes. The manner in which modulation (changing keys, modes, etc.) employed by Eurpides and Timotheus also appears to have been, or been felt as, considerably more unrestrained than  earlier composers.

Performances of classical tragedies were musical events more akin to a modern opera or musical than to a theater play. The inherent metricality of the ancient Greek language gives rhythm a special claim to importance when considering ancient music. The allusions to music and to musical instruments lend a number of the choral passages in which they occur a self-referential quality, sometimes with unmistakable implications for the song's performance. A much-debated question in Greek musical scholarship has been the question of how and to what extent the melodic shape was dictated or influenced by the pitch accents intrinsic to the pronunciation of Greek words. Greek music found on papyri and inscriptions dating from the third century BCE on exhibit a high degree of correspondence between melody and pitch accent, and evidence from other pitched languages show that correspondence of this kind is not uncommon.

            Next: Rip rapped in iambic trimeter, but wrote songs in meters appropriate to the emotions being expressed by his characters. Try typing TRIMETER without spell correction making it into TRIMESTER.

Euripides' Trojan Women Day 7: Helen and Menelaus

Menelaus and Helen
          After Andromache’s lament comes the scene in which Helen defends her behavior to Menelaus, who is determined to kill her for eloping. Helen’s remarkable performance backfires through its sophistic arguments, arrogance, and appropriation by a woman of the male prerogative of public speech. But it also draws attention to Helen’s body and its visual power. Hecuba, who speaks in response, rebuts Helen’s arguments but cannot compete with her self-display. Euripides thus stages a contest between visual “persuasion” and the power of rational discourse. The judge, Menelaus, is convinced by Hecuba, but the play ends with signs that Helen’s beauty will overcome his better judgment.           
          The Greeks so far have been a dimly perceived offstage force, unstoppable but invisible. Now Menelaus enters. He has come in search of a very specific prisoner, his wife Helen, the woman who caused the war by eloping with the Trojan prince Paris, who  is now dead. Helen has yet to be punished and Menelaus intends to take Helen home and kill her. For Hecuba this offers hope of another sort; it provides an opportunity for some kind of justice from the gods. She is however suspicious of Helen's power over Menelaus and Menelaus' ability to resist. Helen herself now enters, the only female in the play not abased, abashed and humiliated. She is dressed to kill. She enters not pleading but complaining at the undignified treatment she has received from Menelaus' guards. Her arrival triggers a formal debate of a sort loved by Euripides, in which she is virtually put on trial by Hecuba in the presence of Menelaus, who is judge. Helen's case like her first entrance is brash and confident and well…. shameless. Having betrayed her husband, she places the blame on everyone but herself. It is Hecuba's fault; she should have had her son Paris killed in infancy after dreaming that he would destroy the city. It is also the goddess Aphrodite's fault; Aphrodite gave her to Paris as prize for his infamous judgement in the divine beauty contest. Aphrodite also inspired Helen's desire for Paris; Helen was an innocent victim of overwhelming divine power. So far from being happy in Troy she tried hard to escape. By an obscure logic she even claims that she has brought benefit to Greece, since the alternative to Aphrodite's victory in the beauty contest was the bribe offered to Paris by Athena, that Paris would rule over Asia and Europe. Aphrodite's gift of Helen to Paris substituted the departure of one woman for the Asiatic conquest of Greece.        
           Hecuba is able to refute Helen point by point, both her attempt to shift the blame and her false claims of attempted escape. It's important here also to note that she speaks second and it's the golden rule in Greek dramatic debates that the second is the stronger case. But even if we accept some of Helen's points - and not everything she says can be dismissed - her insistence on locating blame everywhere but herself leaves a hole in her logic.          The chorus are satisfied that Hecuba is right. They would of course, as Hecuba's countrywomen. More importantly Menelaus finds for the prosecution. Helen is to die. But she will not die now. He will instead take her home. But no member of the original audience could fail to see the irony in all of this. No myth told of Helen's punishment. Menelaus famously failed to punish her and she returned home with him, as we know for instance from Homer's Odyssey, to a life of domesticity. Equally important, Hecuba too knows that if Helen travels with Menelaus on his ship, she will win him over. So the one prospect Hecuba had of extracting some satisfaction from her situation comes to nothing.

Euripides' Trojan Women Day 6: IT'S AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD!

Trojan Women always reminds me of Beckett’s Endgame, “You’re on the earth. There’s no cure for that.” Like Endgame the Trojan Women starts after the “end of the world.”

            At the heart of the play is Hecuba, in the very literal sense that she remains on stage throughout, while others come and go. Though there are lots of entrances and exits, there is little forward movement in the plot. Instead what we see is a relentless assault on Hecuba, as she is struck by blow after blow. Already in Homer Hecuba is associated with suffering, as she watches her son Hector hunted and killed by Achilles. In this play she continues to suffer. Hecuba begins the play at what in theatre terms looks like the lowest point in her fortunes. At the opening of the play Poseidon points her out, prostrate on the ground. We almost seem to have wandered into the end of the story, a sense reinforced by the gods taking their leave of Troy and deciding the fate of the departing Greeks. It seems that all is now over for Hecuba. This is the drift of her song of lament, the first words she utters in the play. She is now a slave, her head shaved, her city destroyed, waiting to see the survivors sent off to Greece as slaves. But the play will show that this is not the end but just another beginning of new kinds of suffering. During the scenes that follow her world is dismantled around her, as members of the family are physically removed from her by the Greek herald and parcelled off or slaughtered. 

          The first to come and go is Cassandra, who reprises in this play the cameo role she played in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus as the wild prophet who sees what other people cannot. Already raped by Locrian Ajax, as we know from the divine conversation at the beginning, she is now to become the concubine of Agamemnon, the leader of the victorious army, reduced like Hecuba from high to low but in her case to become and object for others' use, from princess and virgin priestess to sex slave.

          The next refugee to enter is her daughter-in-law, Andromache, Hector's widow. Before she introduces us to her own suffering Andromache brings news of another daughter of Hecuba, Polyxena. This is not the first we've heard of Polyxena in this play. Talthybius, the Greek herald, had spoken of her earlier in a very obscure way. Hecuba did not understand him. The audience did, because one of the elements inherited from epic and earlier tragedy was the appearance of the spirit of Achilles to demand the sacrifice of Polyxena as an offering on his tomb; Sophocles had written a tragedy on the subject. So Hecuba receives a second blow. The loss is emphasized by the brutal way Hecuba describes the death - Polyxena has her throat slit on Achilles' tomb. Euripides treats the same story in another of his plays, Hecuba, where the nobility of Polyxena in meeting her death is stressed. Here there is no nobility, just brutality and helpless victimhood.      

      This scene thus gives us not one but two female victims, since Andromache not only tells Hecuba about Polyxena but also laments her fate. At the end of Andromache's lamenting Hecuba, who suffers for and with all of them, sees herself as literally overwhelmed by waves of suffering. But worse is still to come. Hecuba in encouraging Andromache to endure in spite of everything points out that if Andromache survives, she can rear her son by Hector, Astyanax, to manhood. Troy is not lost completely, since there is another generation. While Astyanax survives, so does Troy. At this point the Greek herald enters again to announce a mission which even he finds distasteful. The army has decided that it would be stupid to let Hector's son live to avenge his father's death. At one stroke Hecuba's hope for a Trojan revival is obliterated.

            But now the Greeks will add insult to injury. Guess who shows up? Tune in tomorrow.

Euripides Day 5: Playing the OTHER

Many scholars emphasize the role that the chorus plays in reacting to events on stage on behalf of the audience. They are the physical, cognitive, and emotional link between the world of the heroes in the drama and the world of the fifth century Athenian audience; the audience therefore experiences the action and suffering of the drama by way of the chorus. In recent years, however, there have been several studies that seek to undermine the authority of the chorus by emphasizing their marginality and frequent lack of knowledge or agency within the plays.

The former view of the chorus must therefore account for the extraordinary disparity between the Athenian citizen audience and the marginal identity of the chorus of most dramas. For choruses of captive women, we must ask how characters who are wholly opposite to the Greek citizen male could speak to the values of those in the audience or teach the young men portraying them. It is in fact the disparity between the chorus member and the character of the captive woman he becomes in performance that is one of the more extraordinary aspects of the captive woman’s lament. 

The most obvious category separating the Athenian audience and many tragic choruses is gender. Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the many continuities (as well as the discontinuities) involved in the incorporation of choruses of young women from archaic and aristocratic festival contexts into the world of the City Dionysia. The impersonation of the choral dancing of adolescent females by adolescent males seems to have been a crucial element in the experience of being a chorus member.

The choral singing and dancing of young men in tragic choruses is only one component of tragedy’s engagement with feminine modes of discourse, however, and is part of a larger structure. The classic study in English of the feminine and the theater is Froma Zeitlin’s Playing the Other (1996), which draws on her own earlier pathfinding work and that of other scholars such as Nicole Loraux and Jean-Pierre Vernant. In her analyses of several individual works of epic, tragedy, and comedy, Zeitlin articulates the theory that Greek tragedy uses the feminine to explore the masculine, and it does so under the aegis of the god Dionysus, who is the god most clearly associated with the crossing of boundaries and the impersonation of the other. The experience of “playing the other” belongs to both the actors on stage and the spectators in the audience, and it is by no means confined to the playing of female roles by male actors. The tragedies of Euripides offer the most complete exploration of the phenomenon.

Note:  While it is true that not all choruses are women, the choruses of two-thirds of the surviving tragedies are. Since the same chorus danced all four plays that were entered by each playwright, the vast majority of all choruses would have danced the role of a woman.

Euripides Day 4: Uncensoring Women's Voices

          The genre of tragedy hinges on opposites; it hinges upon otherness. Tragedies were performed for the body of Athenian citizens, thus male, free, and, of course, Athenians. Many tragedies, such as Trojan Women, portray groups which stand in complete antithesis to the audience: in this case, female, captive, and foreign. Perhaps this is the reason tragedies moved to pity and fear, based on Aristotelian criteria.

          Pity could be experienced due to the distancing effect obtained through the “foreignness” of the characters: the audience could see them as objects, something detached from them to feel sorry for. Yet these characters experienced sufferings that could fall upon any human being, since fate is blind to class, gender, and rank, thus representing a source of fear for the audience. Trojan Women describes a scenario which resembles the modern humanitarian crisis and depicts the feelings and grief of people, especially women, seeking sanctuary from war and from human annihilation, and the response of those who caused their displacement and are in the position to decide their fate.

“She spoke in this way while crying, and raised unabating lament.” With these words Hecuba is last depicted in the Iliad. (Hom. Il. 24.760) Grief-stricken, she weeps for the death of her son Hector, breaker of horses, accompanied by the cries of the other Trojan women. This closing scene, so emotionally charged, served as inspiration for Euripides in composing The Troades. This play represents an instance of uncensoring in a metapoetic way, since it allows the women’s lament (not fully reported in the Iliad) to be heard and, at the same time, it allows the reader to witness the process of censoring which occurs within the play. In fact, the Greeks seek to destroy the women’s identity by not listening to them and by actively commanding them to not lament. Acts of censorship at the expense of women in the tragedy are not a figment of Euripides’ imagination, but they reflect the legal discourse pertaining to women’s participation in ritual lament in 6th and 5th century Greece. The attempts to suppress women’s voices by means of laws can be viewed as legal violence. Yet, Euripides was always granted a chorus, even though he presented multiple viewpoints and controversial topics in every play. He at least tried to teach men about women’s voices needing to be heard. Democracy was invented, not perfected by the Athenians. Look how long it took to end slavery and give women the right to vote!

Euripides Day 3: Trojan Women Prologue

Troades, (the Trojan Women), was produced in 415 BCE, last of three tragedies, following the lost Alexandros and Palamedes. The lost satyr play was about Sisyphus.  From the extant fragments and scholia, we learn that the three tragedies have a theme in common besides the Trojan War, that of how situations and people can become or reveal that they are the opposite of what they appear to be:

1.Alexandros is the story of how the exposed child Paris/Alexandros is not a low-born herdsman, but a prince, and his happy return designates the beginning of disaster

2. Palomedes appears to be a traitor without being one, “framed” for treachery by Odysseus and Diomedes.

3. In the Trojan Women, the Greeks seem to think they won, but as we know and Cassandra predicts, the Greeks will lose more than they gained in the war.

            There are “ring structures” and “mirroring” between the plays as well. In Trojan Women, Andromache’s entrance echoes Hector’s role and ethical stance in Alexandros, and Helen as cause of the war mirrors Alexandros. The ruse and malice of Odysseus in Palamedes might have been echoes in the satyr play, since according to one myth, Sisyphus seduced Anticleia on the night before her wedding and so was the real father of Odysseus.

            Trojan Women begins with a Euripidean prologue featuring two gods, Poseidon, who helped build Troy and was on their side, and Athena, who was behind the Greeks until they desecrated her temple in Troy when Ajax drag suppliant Cassandra from the altar. The Greeks did nothing and so Athena says  literally “I want to throw in for them a homecoming that is no homecoming.” "δύσνοστον αὐτοῖς νόστον ἐμβαλεῖν θέλω.(75). Thus the prologue creates an ironic framework within which the last hours of Troy are to be viewed. Poseidon’s final words open out, as lines at ends of scenes ten to do, beyond the immediate situation. 
"A fool is he who sacks the towns of men, with shrines and tombs, the dead man's hallowed home, for at the last he makes a desert round himself and dies."
μῶρος δὲ θνητῶν ὅστις ἐκπορθεῖ πόλεις,
ναούς τε τύμβους θ᾽, ἱερὰ τῶν κεκμηκότων,
ἐρημίᾳ δοὺς αὐτὸς ὤλεθ᾽ ὕστερον.
These lines give a clear signal that the following is to be taken as a cautionary tale.

          The Greeks try to undermine the power that language grants to the women in order to create an increasingly wider gap between themselves and their captives. In the prologue, Poseidon employs a palette of expressions indicating emptiness and lifelessness which represents a prelude to the attempted annihilation of the women. 65 He uses terms such as ὄλωλε (“to destroy,” 9), πορθηθεῖσ᾿(“to plunder,” 9), ἔρημα (“deserted,” 15), φόνῳ (“bloodshed,” 16), πέπτωκε (“to fall,” 17), λείπω (“to leave behind,” 25), ἐρημία (“desolation,” 26, 97), φροῦδος (“vanished,” 41), κατῃθαλωμένην (“to burn to ashes,” 60), ἔπερσάν (“to waste,” 72), and ἐκπορθεῖ (“to pillage,” 95). These expressions anticipate how the Achaeans will empty the women of their life and divest them of subjectivity through silencing. In fact, not only do the Greeks treat the Trojan women as mere objects at a physical level, but they also intend to dehumanize them psychologically by suppressing their ability to speak.