"As Troianas" fala-nos da guerra de Tróia.
Mas apesar disto conta-nos mais particularmente a história das troianas (cativas dos gregos): Cassandra, Andrómaca, Policena e Hécuba.
Ao mesmo tempo que vemos a destruição de Tróia, ficamos a conhecer o destino destas 4 mulheres, que sendo elas esposas de grades guerreiros, acabam por tornar-se escravas e cativas dos gregos. Cada uma com a sua histórias, com as suas catástrofes, mas todas com o mesmo destino, o de esquecerem os seus maridos e servirem até à morte o seu senhor.
Está é uma tragédia que arranca de nós várias emoções, desde despreso pelos gregos, por tudo aquilo que faziam, a nojo, pelas situações de violações, e também nos leva a um estado de grande emoção (que no meu caso me fez chorar), quando Ulisses decide que o filho de Andrómaca e Héctor não deve viver e então ele é arrancado dos braços da mãe e atirado da torre do castelo.
Este último evento foi talvez o que mais me arrepiou e emocionou, o desespero de Andrómaca, que já tinha ficado viúva, ver-se obrigada a "dar" o seu filho, pois o senhor mandava e a vê-lo morrer nas mãos dos maiores inimigos de seu pai.
Apesar destes momentos, ficamos a conhecer outras situações em que provavelmente tenhamos vontade de arrancar os cabelos a alguém. A forma como mulheres e crianças eram tratadas, se não fossem parte da realeza, ou dos deuses. A forma inumana com que tratavam os "Traidores".

Ao longo de todo o livro vai-nos sendo apresentado diversos pontos de vista.
Todo o livro está bem estruturado, pelo menos na minha opinião. Na introdução ficamos a saber o porquê deste ser o destino destas mulheres. No desenvolvimento são nos apresentados os argumentos para este destino e o próprio destino de cada uma, com descrições necessárias para compreender a história. Na conclusão, eu pessoalmente fiquei um pouco confusa, mas encontramos um diálogo entre Hécuba e Menelao em que esta tenta convencê-lo a castigar Helena.

É realmente um bom livro, com algumas lacunas, isto talvez por não conhecer a fundo a história de Ulisses e não ter lido Ilíada (acredito que provavelmente se tivesse lido este livro antes teria outra perspectiva da história).

Foi uma boa leitura apesar de ter sido quase "obrigada" a lê-lo já que as escolhas não eram as mais simpáticas e as outras obras que faziam parte da lista de obras a apresentar não me chamaram à atenção.

A Vossa Gothic Clare

This volume includes a very informative introduction, as well as notes, and glossary - all of which are very helpful, in both understanding the context within which the play was composed and the many references in the play to myths, gods, and so forth. The play did not win first prize at the annual theatrical competition held in Athens (perhaps similar to our era's Oscars) although it took second prize; this isn't surprising since it conveys a nearly 100% negative image of the "heroic" Achaeans who sailed to Troy to retrieve Helen. Only the herald, Talthybius, comes across as human - the rest of the Greeks, including "heroes" like Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaus - are all portrayed as cruel, barbaric, and "blinded" by lust or illusions of honor, into pursuing a ten-year war to obtain a woman, whom they expect to be put to death once captured. Thus, even the "prize" they were supposedly fighting for, is to be turned into nothing. Thus, the whole point of the war, aside from "making a point" that the Trojans cannot be allowed to "get away" with "stealing" Menelaus' wife Helen, is, ultimately, nothing.

This is an anti-war play which must have made the Athenians watching it very uncomfortable - given the contemporary events unfolding at the time in Athens. Athens was about to launch the ill-fated Sicilian invasion. Athens had embarked on an imperialist course in the Aegean - transforming the Delian League into its plaything, a compact for its own benefit. The unending scramble among Greek city-states for supremacy continued - leading to the disunity in the Greek peninsula that made it so easy for Greece to be conquered later on by the Macedonians. The sort of barbaric idiots who insist on war, using any pretext - including fighting for a woman they even characterize as a "slut" - resulted in the subsuming of Greece, the subjugation of the nation of Greece as a province within larger empires since the time of the Macedonian expansion under Philip and Alexander. The "big mouths" and egos of the Greeks led to their undoing. Perhaps this play was a sort of warning to the Greeks - although obviously Euripides would have no way of knowing what was to come for Greece - that the hubris of war waged on a purely irrational basis, whipped up for the slightest pretext, or based on an exaggerated notion of honor - leads to the nemesis of eventual destruction, and that the "penalty" for this hubris, the nemesis, cannot be avoided. Euripides thus turns the cornerstones of the Greeks' touchstone of their self-regard - the Homeric poems - inside out. The "heroic" Greeks - celebrated a million times in legend, on vase painting, on friezes of temples, on lifelike sculptures and no doubt exquisite paintings - are seen to be cruel barbarians, destroying Troy over a "prize" they intended to destroy anyway, for the sake of "honor" or even more basely, "booty." The gods are about the punish the Greeks by making their return journey home miserable; thus, the "adventures" of the Odyssey can be read as the "just punishment" of the gods imposed on just one crew making its journey home - the commander, Odysseus, having taken as his slave the fallen Trojan queen Hecuba, along with her curses upon him and all the Greeks. Perhaps the Homeric poems did convey this "moral" to the Greeks, who otherwise appear to be lacking in an ethical foundation insofar as their myths celebrate vengeance, blood-thirstiness, and so forth: Hubris, or what we might call today "sin" of waging a vengeful and unjust war, results in the nemesis or "punishment" of the downfall of commander after commander afterwards, as the gods "get their revenge" for various arrogant insults against them, such as the taking of Trojan virgin priestess Cassandra as a sex slave by Achilles' son, and the unjust sacrifice of Iphigenia prior to setting sail - if not for the entire enterprise of the war, waged to regain a prize that the Greeks want destroyed anyway. The above may seem simplistic - no doubt the Greeks of those days didn't view the story of the Trojan war and its aftermath as a moral tale. Instead, it must have been seen then as it is often depicted in movies today: A heroic battle, followed by the struggles of a clever hero, who finally reaches home, puts his house in order, and is reunited with his faithful wife Penelope, the antithesis of Helen.

If the play describes the aftereffects of the battle for Troy, the beguiling power of Helen - who does not lose an iota of her composure and hauteur in her discussion with the devastated Hecuba - is also a focus of the play. The theatergoers of course would have known that Helen is not in the end put to death by her husband Menelaus. Helen's "explanation" for what happened - her running off with handsome Paris while Menelaus had traveled to Crete - because Aphrodite had appeared with Paris and ensnared Helen with irrational love for Paris, didn't really convince Menelaus in the play. It doesn't matter though, since Helen's charms, no matter who was wrong, who was victimized, whether Helen is lying or telling the truth, again "win" over Menelaus, and as we know, the half-divine Spartan queen, a daughter of Zeus and a mortal woman, does eventually return to her homeland and resume her place as Menelaus' spouse in the palace of Sparta. Obviously, the "moral" of the story of Helen, is that no man, not even her ridiculously "wronged" husband, can resist her - she always gets her way because of the power of her looks, composure, and no doubt many times lying words. The problem Helen embodies is the problem of the irrational - in her case, lust - vs. logic. Logic would have written off Helen's departure/abduction from Sparta, but logic never drove men's affairs. Instead, Menelaus was driven by "honor" to organize the expedition to Troy, invoking the alliance of the Greek states to assist one another in warfare if one of them were wronged. Was Menelaus wronged? His wife ran off with a prince he was hosting. Perhaps this violation of the inviolate Greek notion of hospitality/honor did translate in Menelaus' mind as a transgression that could only be corrected by retrieving his wife and punishing Paris. But did this one drama of a wife leaving her husband, really merit starting an invasion of Asia by the Greeks - or were they all really blinded by her, did lust for her turn them into barbarians, despite their "pretensions" to civilization. The Greeks ripped off whatever they could steal from Troy, including female slaves, after killing all the Trojan defenders. They did retrieve Helen. Was this what they were fighting for - for ten years - "booty?"

Euripides' play is harrowing and it can only be imagined what it may have been like to view it enacted as it would have been by masked actors, perhaps accentuating the horror of the disasters that befell the female Trojan captives in the course of the play. It no doubt made the audience think and consider what it means to crush an enemy, for what? To gain the upper hand, to rob them, and take them into slavery? Unfortunately, this instructive play, which invites the viewer to look at the "heroic" age from the vantage point of the conquered, and to question what was the point of destroying Troy - is gaining booty "worth" the destruction of an entire nation - perhaps, what's the point of war based on greed - didn't lead the Greeks to mend their ways. They never abandoned their warlike ways, constantly fighting among themselves - until, divided and weakened, they too were conquered by Macedon and later, Rome. The "lesson" of Troy - that the Greeks once did unite to fight a common enemy, was only duplicated in the struggle vs. Persia. Otherwise, disunity and warfare among the Greek states was ongoing, and led eventually to the conquest of the Greek peninsula and archipelago.

Perhaps the most oppressively lugubrious of the Greek dramas, Euripides’ Trojan Women is painted with unremitting strokes of horror and dread. Troy has fallen; neither its ancient, unassailable walls, nor even the mighty arm of Hector could save the most innocent and vulnerable of its people from the brutality now being visited upon them. Priam, the wise old king, is dead; Hector, Ilium’s most valiant defender, is dead; Paris is dead. The men of the city have been massacred, and it is now the lot of the women to be apportioned to the victors as trophies of war. Everything they know, and everyone they love, has been turned to ashes; now they will be carried off in binds to alien lands, where they will live out the remainder of their days as slaves and concubines, in bitter grief and travail.

Hecuba, wife of Priam and mother of Hector, Paris, Polyxena, Cassandra, and many others, is a broken woman. With Helen, Cassandra, and her daughter-in-law Andromache, she languishes outside the Greek encampment, where an assembly of leering warriors will decide to whom she and her companions in despondency now belong. Throughout the play, the Greek messenger Talthybius appears to deliver one crushing blow after another. First, he subtly apprises Hecuba of Polyxena’s fate, which is later confirmed in its grisly details by Andromache: her daughter was slaughtered as a sacrifice over the tomb of Achilles, and her blood poured out as libation. Next, the women learn the news they’ve been dreading: to which of their ravishers they will now become property. Andromache, the wife of Hector, will become wife to Neoptolemus, the son of the man who slew him. Cassandra, a consecrated virgin and half-crazed prophetess of Apollo, having already been raped in the temple of Athena by Ajax the Lesser, is now assigned to Agamemnon; and in a dark delirium she exalts to her mother in her “good fortune” to become the “wife” of a king. Helen, whose beauty set this tragedy in motion, will be returned to her husband Menelaus, who vows, under Hecuba’s encouragement, to put her to death upon their return to Sparta. But Hecuba thinks her own fate the most pitiful: she will become the slave of the conniving Odysseus, whose machinations brought Troy to its knees.

Hecuba’s only meager ray of hope takes the form of her little grandson, Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache. Perhaps it is the will of the gods that the boy will live to redeem his city and vindicate its hallowed dead. But then comes the final missive of Talthybius, and all hope is vanquished: the treacherous Odysseus has convinced the assembly that the boy is too dangerous to be spared. He will be thrown from the high walls of Troy; unfit to live precisely because his father had performed such heroics to protect him.

Cradling the body of Astyanax on the shield of Hector, Hecuba delivers one of the play’s many bone-chilling lines:

“Poor boy, how horribly your own home’s walls,
the ramparts of Apollo, crushed your head
and ripped the curls your mother doted on;
She often used to kiss you there—where blood
laughs out between the broken bits of skull.”

In the end, the Argives, though momentarily victorious, will not be relieved of their own sorrows. Athena and Poseidon, outraged by the sacrilegious carnage, have their own scores to settle.

The Trojan Women fascinates not only with its gruesome subject matter, but also with the context in which it was first performed. In 415 BC, though a temporary truce was in place, Athens was still embroiled in a grueling war with Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies; a war that it would ultimately lose, terminating with its own sacking. Just a few months before the first performance, the Athenians had utterly destroyed the tiny island state of Melos, butchering the men and enslaving the women and children. The Melians had maintained their neutrality in the war, and they posed no conceivable threat to the Athenian Empire; but their refusal to enlist themselves in the Athenian cause drew murderous wrath upon them. Euripides could have had the fate of Melos in mind when he placed this admonishment in the mouth of Hecuba before an audience of Athenian citizen-soldiers, virtually all of whom would have supported the atrocity and some of whom may have even participated in it:

“O, Greeks! Your weapons had more force than sense:
why did you feel afraid of this young boy?
Strange and unnatural killing. Did you fear
he’d one day raise up fallen Troy? You’re worthless!
We were losing even then, when Hector
stood strong against your hundred thousand spears.”

Like the Trojans, the Athenians trusted in the strength of their walls, unable to conceive that their own beloved city might befall the same fate they had inflicted on so many others. Like the wrathful Greek army, their own city was governed by a raucous assembly, which could be manipulated by Odyssean demagogues into endorsing cruel, unreasonable, and self-destructive measures.

It may be fitting that during the same year, the Athenian assembly approved the ill-fated Sicilian expedition: a terminal, hubristic miscalculation that would ultimately spell their own downfall.

n   In times of sorrow it is a comfort to lament,
To shed tears, and find music that will voice our grief.n

In The Women of Troy, not much happens in terms of action or plot; Troy has fallen at the hands of the Greeks, and while the men have been killed, the women await their fate. They will become slaves, this much they know; it only remains to be seen with whom, and in what position, fate (i.e. the Greeks) will place them. Euripides wrote The Women of Troy in part to show his fellow citizens what they had done to Melos; or rather, to show how they had wronged its people after they captured the island, when the Athenians put to death all male inhabitants, sold all women and children as slaves, and then proceeded to colonized its land. The play is poignant and evocative; the state of the women, once proud Trojans, now debased and on the brink of slavery, is touching. What is especially good, I think, is the moral and psychological complexity that Euripides portrays; Hecabe, widow of the fallen Priam, King of Troy, begins the play in the highest of moral grounds, so to speak – as the widow of the slain king and mother of brave Hector. Yet, while she – understandably –laments the sorry state of both Troy and her own life, with a certain amount of dignity, as soon as she is confronted with Helen, whom she blames for the fall of Troy and everyone dear to her, she shows sign of petty vindictiveness and a desire for revenge that seems at odds with her – at least former – royalty. The character of Helen, particular her central speech, is also ambiguous and open to interpretation. The matters of blame and responsibility for the war are left, to a significant extent, open – at least to the audience (do we side with Helen or with Menelaus and Hecabe?). The play, through this complexity, becomes more than a mere lesson to Euripides’ contemporaries, and more than a simple lamentation of the horrors of war (which, to be fair, would be justified in itself).

n  All through these years the gods had but one end in mind,
No other destiny than this for me, and Troy –
The one city they chose for their especial hate.
Our sacrifices and our prayers have all been vain.
Yet, had not heaven cast down our greatness and engulfed
All in the earth’s depth, Troy would be a name unknown,
Our agony unrecorded, and those songs unsung
Which we shall give to poets of a future age.n

At least there's that.

Bello! Mi ha addirittura fatto venire voglia di (ri)leggere l'Iliade, cosa che non avevo mai contemplato di fare. :)

This is a powerful read and I am awed that this exists as we get to a peek into the experience of the women of Troy. I highly recommend reading along with The Lit Life podcast. Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy really expound on this. Also provides more insight into The Iliad and The Odyssey which I have also been reading.

'Las Troyanas' de Eurípides empieza cuando ya todo ha acabado, cuando la guerra de Troya se ha perdido y las mujeres de Troya esperan que se las repartan los griegos para servirlos como esclavas. Me encanta que sean las mujeres las que hablen sobre el sufrimiento que repercute en ellas (y en todo un pueblo) por culpa de la guerra de los hombres. Me encanta que las protagonistas sean mujeres fuertes, que se quieren vengar o que valientemente aceptan su destino con resignación o que (eliminada ya toda esperanza) sólo desean morir.

Eurípides es modernísimo, por atreverse a hacer una obra sin argumento, por su combativo antibelicismo, pero también por la denúncia implícita que hay sobre el papel de las mujeres: se ven envueltas en guerras que no les van ni les vienen y, muertos sus maridos, ya no son nadie y los enemigos se las reparten como una parte más del botín, como meras propiedades.

La obra es un largo lamento. Pero esto tiene contrapartidas; no siempre se puede mantener la intensidad deseada, los personajes no evolucionan, y se hace algo repetitiva. Pero hay momentos auténticamente brillantes y estremecedores, como el loco y autodestructivo deseo de venganza de Casandra y el dolor sordo de Hécuba.

"I will not praise your fear, for fear belongs to the ignorant"

Other than Medea I think this is my favourite work by Euripides. Maybe I like it more I can't really tell.
If you like the story of the Iliad I highly recommend reading this, it tells the story of the Trojan women in the aftermath of the Trojan War specifically the royal family, Queen Hecuba, her daughters Cassandra and Polyxena and her daughter-in-law Andromache. I think it is a necessary read for anyone who reads the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Not a huge fan of the demonization of Helen in the play but I understand why it is included.
I borrowed my copy from the library but now I am hoping to get my hands on my own copy because I would love to reread and annotate this because there are plenty of amazing quotes.

tw// mentions of rape, slavery, child murder, sexism, victim-blaming

There's something about it. It's a wonderful story, the Iliad, but the scene here is wonderfully captured and each and every line feels right. Loved it, if I'm being honest, I think I like it more than Medea...

زنان در جنگ هایی که مردان به راه می اندازند چه نقشی ایفا می کنند؟

“بنگر کجایی، بر سرت چه آمده شهرت ویران شده،
شوی ات مرده. تو شکست خورده ای. تو تنها یک زنی، ما هرکار که بخواهیم می توانیم با تو بکنیم. دیگر دست از جنگ
بردار، ما را برنینگیز، ما را نفرین مکن که کار بدتر می شود،
زیرا اگر ما را به خشم آوری، شاید سپاهیان بر آن شوند که با
پسرت سنگ دلی کنند و کالبدش را به خاک نسپارند.
اکنون خاموش باش، مصائبت را آن گونه که باید تاب بیاور
تا آیین خاکسپاری را از فرزند مردهات دریغ نکنی، و
یونانیان کمتر سخت دل باشند.“

Es una obra corta que narra los destinos que tuvieron algunas mujeres de troya después de la caída de esta ciudad. Hace énfasis en cómo se lamentaban su suerte y se resignaban a los acontecimientos que les esperaban.

Es corto, pero contiene una gran carga emocional.

Έχουμε ακούσει την λέξη "τραγωδία" και "δράμα" τόσες πολλές φορές στην ζωή μας, κυρίως στον προφορικό λόγο προκειμένου να υπερβάλουμε για μια κατάσταση, που έχουμε σχεδόν παρερμηνεύσει και ξεχάσει την βαρύτητα της λέξης.
ΤΡΑΓΩΔΙΑ και ΔΡΑΜΑ λοιπόν το παρόν βιβλίο με την κανονική σημασία των λέξεων. Σε μια πασίγνωστη ιστορία όπο�� συνδέεται με θάρρος, ανδρεία και ηρωικές φιγούρες, ο Ευριπίδης έρχεται και προσθέτει θρήνο, δάκρυ και μοιρολόι. Γυρνάει αριστουργηματικά το νόμισμα και σου δείχνει και την άλλη μεριά. Την μεριά με τα δεινά, τον θάνατο και τον πόνο. Γιατί το συγκεκριμένο νόμισμα είναι ο Πόλεμος και η μία του μεριά θα έχει πάντα ηττημένους.