Trojan Women
Troiades
Victory in war does not exempt the victors from moral judgment, and staging the fall of Troy entirely from the perspective of its enslaved, grieving women indicts the Athenian audience for atrocities their own city was committing at the same time.
- war staged from the losing, enslaved side
- implicit indictment of Athenian atrocity at Melos
- accumulation of grief over conventional plot
- Cassandra, Andromache, and Hecuba's losses
- one of antiquity's starkest anti-war texts
Trojan Women, produced in 415 BC shortly after Athens's brutal massacre of the men of Melos and enslavement of its women and children, depicts the aftermath of Troy's fall entirely through the eyes of its defeated women: Hecuba, the former queen, awaiting news of which Greek captor will claim her; Cassandra, driven to prophetic frenzy; Andromache, told her infant son Astyanax will be thrown from the walls to prevent him avenging his father Hector; and Helen, put on trial by Hecuba for causing the war in the first place. The play offers almost no plot in the conventional sense, only a sustained accumulation of loss, forcing the audience to witness the human cost of a victory that ancient sources widely believed alluded pointedly to Athens's own recent conduct at Melos.
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