Trigger warning - rape

Actual Rating 4.5

This was a required reading for one of my history classes but that didn't stop me from enjoying this brilliant piece of tragedy. Trojan Women is such a melodramatic and masterfully written play. I'm not giving it higher though simply because I didn't feel an emotional attachment to the story. I understand why it is such a brilliant and important piece of theater but that doesn't mean I have to fall in love with the piece. I am glad I read it and I highly recommend it!!

Excelente y muy cortita obra de Eurípides que leí hoy en el tren viniendo para el trabajo.

ملحمة شعرية تحكي عن مأساة سيدات وبنات مدينة طروادة بعد خدعة الاغريق ودخولهم المدينة عن طريق حصان خشبي كبير ممتلئ بالجنود وقتلهم لكل ماهو حي على هذه المدينة الاسيوية الصغيرة حيث لم يبق الا بقايا ابنية وبعض السيدات الكبار بينهم ملكة المدينة وبعض الفتيات الشابات مثل ابنتها كساندرا وزوجة ابنها هكتور وابنه الذي قتله الاغريق لاحقا
استطاعت الملكة هيكوب ان تدخل القارئ لروحها الجريحة وقلبها المحطم بعد زوال ملكها وقتل اولادها وسبي ابنتها وزوجة ابنها وقتل حفيدها الرضيع
استطاعت اناتها ان تصل الى اعماق روحي وهي تحاول ان تصدق ان مدينتها اضحت رماداً وانها فقدت كل شيء في نفس الوقت وكأنه حلم وقد سخطت كل السخط على ذلك المرسال الاغريقي الذي يأتي ليأخذ البنات للنبيلات لخدمة قصور ملكه والعمل على اسعاده ليل نهار وهو من ازال ملكهم وسطوتهم وعزهم
تذكرت في خضم احداث المسرحية وضعنا نحن السوريون في ظل الحرب الم تغدو مدننا دمارا؟ الم يقتل الكثير من الضحايا الابرياء بدون سبب؟ الم يغرق في البحر الاف الحالمين بالامان
يا الهي هذا ما اراده سارتر ان ننظر دواخلنا في كل قصصه ومسرحياته وروايته
سمعتها من اليوتيوب من قناة الاذاعة المصرية
كان اداء الفنانين ممتاز والموسيقى التصويرية جميلة ومناسبة للنص

Cabe destacar que es preferible leer antes la Iliada y la Odisea porque se habla mucho sobre la guerra de Troya en dónde interviene los dioses como Poseidon y Palas Atenea.
También aparecen en escena Helena de Troya, Hécuba que pasa a ser sirvienta de Ulises, y seremos participe de la muerte del último heredero de Troya.
Pasa a tener mucho contexto de lo pocos días dentro de la masacre y ya los últimos segundos en que Poseidon decide intervenir con esos dichosos diez años.
Obra de teatro bastante entretenida y amena, nosé si tiene para reírse pero de igual forma lo hice con el personaje de Talbio, el mensajero de los griegos.

The Trojan Women is a very female-based play, which is definitely welcome, considering that a lot of other dramas from this time are all about the guys and the heroism that came from war. Looking at war from a female point of view presents a much more negative standpoint on the usually-praised art of war. While this play is not really action-based, a lot of the dialogue from various female characters, including Cassandra and Helen, reveal some important historical facts about conquest.

The most important element to take from this play, in my opinion, is the fact that women were treated like possessions or trinkets, especially in times of war. In many Greek plays, women can be seen being given as "gifts" or being taken as "prizes" (ex. Aeschylus' Agamemnon), which really gives insight into what real women of the time must have been viewed as. I really appreciate finding a play that criticizes this action and tells it like it is; therefore, I think that although this may not be the most major play of Euripides, it is still a very important one, especially in the historical context.

For tears are music too and keep a song unheard in hearts that weep.

But the dead has lost his pain and weeps no more.

Death cannot be what life is, child. The cup of death is empty, and life has always hope.

There lives not in my life any more the hope that others have. Nor will I tell the lie to mine own heart, that all is well or shall be well...

The dust as smoke rises, it spreads wide its wing. It makes me as a shadow, and my city a vanished thing.

Out on the smoke she goes, and her name no man knows.

Tanrıların ve erkeklerin hikayesi İlyada'nın karşısına kadınların hikayesi olan Troyalı Kadınlar'ı koyup daha çok sevdiğimi, içselleştirdiğimi, anlamlı bulduğumu söylemem biraz iddialı. Biliyorum duygusal yaklaşıyorum. İlyada sonrası kesinlikle okunması gereken bir tragedya.

Greek hydria, ca 520–510 BCE; Achilles dragging the body of Hector behind his chariot while Hecuba mourns her son's death and the winged figure of Iris pleads for a ransom of Hector’s body.


Joint review of Euripides' The Trojan Women and Jean-Paul Sartre's adaptation Les Troyennes

................... What shall the poet say,
what words will he inscribe upon your monument?
Here lies a little child the Argives killed, because
they were afraid of him. That? The epitaph of Greek shame.


In 415 BCE Euripides staged a trilogy of dramas accompanied by the usual satyr play of which only the final play of the trilogy has survived to our time - The Trojan Women. At the time of this first performance the initial stage of the Peloponnesian War was over and Athens' absurd expedition to Sicily was soon to begin, spurred on by Alcibiades' personal ambition. How the Athenians were to rue that mad decision.

Both sides of the Peloponnesian War had committed the most horrendous of massacres, particularly on the citizens of defeated cities, and I think Euripides had gotten well and truly sick of it. The Trojan Women is the story of the immediate aftermath of the Greeks' victory in the Trojan War, and in Euripides' hands it is a story of brutal, limitless murder by the victors and their dividing up and hauling away of the surviving women as spoils of war. Did the audience squirm in its seats as they watched their famous ancestors murder and rape the now hapless Trojans? In any case, they awarded the festival's theater prize to another playwright.

Not unusually for Euripides, the primary characters of the piece are women, particularly Hecuba, Queen of Troy, Cassandra, the mad seer, Andromache, Hector's widow, and Helen, the Face that Launched a Thousand Ships. They must endure the will of the Greek men, but the latter do not cut a dashing figure in this play, on the contrary.

In a poetic language whose stateliness and power recalls that of Aeschylus and which far outstrips any of the other Euripidean plays I've read, we witness the suffering of the women already staggering under the blows of recent losses who must endure yet further ravages during the play and, as is made oh so clear, for the rest of their lives.(*) It is more than a little harrowing.

In 1965 Jean-Paul Sartre staged an adaptation of The Trojan Women, not a translation, despite how Les Troyennes is catalogued here at GR. Sartre removed much less than he added, for, as he explains in the Introduction, he felt it necessary to fill in for a modern audience that which went without saying for the 5th century Greek audience. But he also saw an opportunity to make some points for a then contemporary audience. He chose to view the Trojan War as a "colonial war", and so the Greeks/Trojans shade into the Europeans/Colonized with interesting effect. Not satisfied with that, Sartre took the implicit nihilism of Euripides' piece in which the gods' whims and fancies saw to it that both the Trojans and the Greeks payed dearly despite all the pleas and sacrifices made to the gods by both sides and made it quite explicit.

Though Sartre writes in the Introduction that he "chose a poetic language which retains the ceremonial character of the text, its rhetorical value, - but which modifies its accent", little remains in Les Troyennes of that ceremonial character, of that rhetorical value, of that poetry. And with those went a fair amount of the emotional power of Euripides' play, at least for me. Nonetheless, it was very interesting to read this refracted image of Euripides' text and to wonder what the audience at the National Popular Theater made of it.


(*) In another play (Andromache) Euripides follows Andromache into her sexual servitude for Achilles' son, Neoptolemus; she bears him a son who replaces Astyanax - the son she bore Hector and who is murdered in The Trojan Women upon Odysseus' insistence - but who is, in turn, threatened with murder by Neoptolemus' Spartan wife. Euripides wrote Andromache quite a bit earlier (428-425), spills a great deal of patriotic bile over the Spartans and even gives the play a relatively happy ending.

من نمی‌دونم تو یونان باستان خود نویسنده‌ها موضوع نمایشنامه رو انتخاب می‌کردند و یا هر دوره در مسابقه‌ای که برگزار می‌شده یک موضوع خاص پیشنهاد می‌شده که بقیه درباره‌اش بنویسند؛ اما به هر حال جالبه که هر نمایشنامه‌ای که از اوریپید من می‌شناسم، نمایشنامه‌ای درباره‌ی زن‌ها و خلق و خوی اونهاست... و جالب‌ترش اینه که ما با یک مردی طرفیم که تو جامعه‌ی 2000 سال پیش یونان این نمایشنامه‌ها رو نوشته... تو دوره‌ای که فیلسوف‌ها و مردم یونانی معتقد بودند برای رسیدن به کمال، مرد (به عنوان یک کامل) باید با یک مرد (به عنوان یک کامل دیگر) ازدواج کنه و زن‌ها به عنوان یک ناقص در کنار بردگان از بسیاری از حقوق برخوردار نبودند.

7/10/2020 * 3 stars
Read for The Literary Life Podcast & Facebook group #20for2020reads

I'm glad I listened to the podcast soon after reading this because that helped me appreciate it so much more than just reading it on my own.

"O vain is man,
Who glorieth in his joy and has no fears:
While to and fro the chances of the years
Dance like an idiot in the wind! And none
By any strength has his own fortune won."

misoginia
(mi·so·gi·ni·a)
1. Aversão ou desprezo pelos indivíduos do sexo feminino.

Origem etimológica:grego misogunía, -as.

https://dicionario.priberam.org/misog....

Não restam dúvidas do motivo da origem etimológica da palavra, mas no caso de restarem, esta tragédia esclarece-as. O espanto consiste no facto de ter sido um homem a escrevê-la. Acredito que devia ser obrigatório ler As Troianas após ler A Íliada - para não restarem mesmo dúvidas que o nome da épica de Homero é claramente o cantar da queda de Tróia, ou Ílion, e não unicamente o cantar dos feitos dos Argivos. Quem o achar contemplou apenas a ponta do iceberg quando leu o poema. Posers.