The Trojan Women

The Trojan Women is a tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, first performed in 415 BCE at the City Dionysia festival in Athens, during the long Peloponnesian War and not long after the Athenian massacre of the population of Melos. Set in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Troy, the play has almost no plot in the conventional sense, instead presenting the fates of the city's surviving women as the victorious Greeks parcel them out as slaves: the former queen Hecuba learns that her daughter Polyxena has been sacrificed at Achilles's tomb and that her infant grandson Astyanax is to be killed to prevent him growing up to avenge Troy, while her daughter Cassandra, cursed to prophesy truly but never be believed, foresees doom for her own Greek captor Agamemnon. Euripides wrote the play with almost no interest in celebrating the Greek victory, instead using the women's grief, one after another, to expose the human cost that a triumphant war narrative ordinarily leaves out. Widely read as one of the starkest anti-war statements to survive from classical antiquity, The Trojan Women has been repeatedly restaged and adapted in later eras, especially during and after the World Wars, as a direct commentary on the suffering war inflicts on civilians rather than combatants.