特洛伊妇女

Dawn is just breaking, and the walls of Troy are still smoking. A baby's small body is carried back on a bronze war shield — the one Hector used, whose owner died only yesterday, and now the child laid on it is gone too. No one comes to help. No one rushes out for revenge. Even the herald carrying the body keeps his eyes down. This is the ending Euripides put on the Athenian stage, not the beginning — the play never shows the ten-year siege, never shows the wooden horse or the sack of the city. It shows only the morning after.

The Trojan Women is an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides (c. 480-406 BC). He wrote a great many tragedies over his lifetime, and only a handful survive; among them, The Trojan Women is the coldest, the quietest, and the hardest to sit through. It premiered at the City Dionysia in Athens in 415 BC, the final play of that year's Trojan trilogy, staged alongside Alexandros and Palamedes, and took second prize. Twenty-four centuries later it is still being staged. Gilbert Murray's 1905 English translation traveled especially far — it turned up again and again on the anti-war stages around World War I, for a simple reason: it lays the cost of war straight in front of the audience, with nothing softened.

There are no heroes in this play. Standing at the center of the stage are four women and a child. Hecuba, the old queen of Troy, has lost her husband Priam and every one of her sons; she lies in the ruins waiting to be told whom she will serve for the rest of her life. Cassandra, her daughter, carries Apollo's curse — everything she says is true, and no one believes her — and she is about to be handed over to the Greek commander Agamemnon. Andromache, Hector's widow, still holds her nursing infant, a boy named Astyanax, the last root of the Trojan royal line. Helen, the Spartan queen who has carried the blame for this war for two thousand years, is brought before her husband Menelaus to stand trial. Menelaus says he will kill her, then softens partway through. And there is a herald, Talthybius, whose whole job is to carry bad news, trip after trip, into these women's ears.

The story takes place on a morning with no heroes in it. The Greeks have won. Ten years of war are over, the city has fallen, the men are all dead, and the surviving women and children are gathered in makeshift camps by the shore, waiting for the Greek commanders to claim them one by one, like spoils being divided up. The whole stage is ruins — collapsed walls, smoke that hasn't cleared, tents the Greek army has pitched — not one inch of it still belongs to the home these women had.

The play opens not with people but with gods. Poseidon stands in the ruins mourning — he built these city walls with his own hands. Athena had been on the Greek side, but on the day the city fell, Greek soldiers stormed her temple and dragged Cassandra away from the altar to rape her, and in her fury Athena switches sides too. The two gods plot together up in the sky: the victorious Greek fleet will hit a great storm on the way home. On one side, the women of the city are still weeping; on the other, the gods are already writing the verdict for the winners. From its very first line, the play tears the word 'winning' apart. Structurally, Euripides hands the whole play's moral judgment to the gods in the prologue, and never brings it up again — what's left is only the human world.

Hecuba wakes from sleep — or from a faint. She does not yet know her husband died at the altar, does not know her sons have all been killed. What she hears first is the herald reading out the assignment list: Cassandra to Agamemnon, Andromache to Neoptolemus, and herself to Odysseus. Odysseus, the cleverest of the Greeks, the one who proposed the wooden horse ten years earlier. It is not death that breaks her. What breaks her is this: the man she must now serve is the one who destroyed her family with his own hands, and she will serve him for the rest of her life. This might be the quietest, and the sharpest, cut in the whole play.

Her daughter Cassandra enters next. She comes in dancing, in a white robe, a torch raised in her hand, calling out happily that this is her wedding. It chills anyone watching — she is being taken as a captive concubine, not a bride. But is this madness? No, she sees too clearly. Her gift of prophecy has already shown her what comes next: Agamemnon will bring her home, and the two of them will die together at Clytemnestra's hand. Dancing with her torch raised is the one chance in her whole life to turn around and frighten the Greeks instead. The most counterintuitive moment in the play is this: a woman's ecstasy, built entirely on knowing that all of them are going to die.

When Andromache comes on stage carrying her child, the herald brings her two pieces of news. One is that she will be given to the man who killed her husband Hector, Neoptolemus, Achilles' son. The other is worse: the Greeks are afraid this child will grow up to avenge his father, so they have decided to throw him from the walls of Troy to his death. She pleads. The herald keeps his eyes down, unable to look at her, but an order is an order, and the child is taken from her arms. Euripides handles this scene with a strange calm, no wailing, no screaming. What Andromache begs for is only this: that the boy not be told, that he think he is falling asleep instead of dying. This is the last thing a mother can think to ask for, in a moment like this.

A trial is woven into the middle of the play. Helen is brought before Menelaus. She defends herself, saying it was all Aphrodite's fault, that it was fate, that she never had a choice. Hecuba steps in to argue against her — you spent these ten years safe inside the city, well fed, while how many of us died? Then she turns to Menelaus: don't just talk, kill her. Menelaus wavers partway through the trial — whether he is dazzled again by her old beauty or genuinely softening, Euripides never says — and in the end decides to take Helen back to Greece to deal with later. The result is that the woman who started this war does not die. She goes home to Greece. This might be the hardest thing to swallow in the whole play.

The herald Talthybius returns, this time carrying a shield, the bronze shield Hector once used in life. Astyanax lies on it, a small body. Hecuba takes him in her own hands, wipes his face clean, and sings a long lament. Her grief is tightly controlled — she wipes the ash from his face while saying things that are clear-eyed to the point of cruelty. She does not mourn his bad luck. What she says is: you could have been a king. For a murdered child, the greatest tragedy is not that he died, but that he never got the chance to grow up.

The play's final scene is fire. The Greeks set the whole city ablaze, and the walls of Troy come crashing down in flames. The women and children are marched toward the ships waiting on the shore. Hecuba breaks free of her guards and rushes toward the fire, trying to burn with the city, and is dragged back by force. She is not allowed to die — this may be the play's cruelest irony, that she is denied even the right to go down with her city. When the curtain falls there is no reversal, no god arriving to save anyone, no revenge, no reunion. A city is destroyed, a group of people is put on a ship, and that is the end. When Euripides wrote this ending, Athens was deep in the Peloponnesian War — the Athenians, too, were the winners.

This play is anti-war, but it never shouts a slogan. Its method is to hold the question of what happens after you win right up against the audience's face — the winning men go home, the women's remaining lives are yours to hand out, the children's lives are yours to decide, the walls are yours to burn. The gods have already promised in the prologue that the Greek fleet will hit a storm on the way home, but so what? The storm is still in the future; right now, in this moment, the child's body is already lying in the shield. Euripides' cruelest move is this: from beginning to end, these women control nothing about their own lives, who they are given to, who they marry, whether their children live or die is all decided by someone else's word, and yet every one of them, facing catastrophe, still speaks with a clear mind and sings a complete song. That dignity is not there to inspire anyone. It is there so you can see exactly where the line being trampled runs.

Seen from twenty-four centuries later, this play still stings. It is about the morning after a city falls, but swap Troy for any other name — Hiroshima, Berlin, Sierra Leone, Bosnia — and the outline stays the same: the women marched onto ships, the children thrown from the walls. This is also why it was dug back up and staged again around World War I. Europe had just finished a war it had won, and was about to walk into the next one.

By now you probably know what happens. But Euripides' play was written for the ear, not the eye. The long laments, accusations, and pleas are each poetry: rhythm, line break, pause, the friction between one word and the next. A translation loses seventy percent of that and still keeps thirty. Take the scene where Hecuba wipes the baby's body clean. Reduced to plot, it is just 'she prepares the child for burial.' Read those actual pages, though, and there is a pressure in them, a throat clamped shut against crying, that no summary can give you. One more thing: there is not a single villain in this play, not even the herald who carries the body, who visibly softens, and together it still adds up to total catastrophe. That particular horror, the horror of no villain at all, only lands if you read it yourself.