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.
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