Spoiler
Euripides highlights the plight of those who cannot protect themselves when war is lost. Discuss.
Since the days of classical Greek theatre, plays have served as vehicles to highlight the anguish suffered by the vulnerable of society during conflict, and Euripides’ “Women of Troy” is no exception. Euripides implores his audience to delve into the meaning of vulnerability as he brutally condemns both the feeble and naturally strong characters of Hellenic society. Indeed, he even challenges the notion of triumph in conflict as the victorious are also punished and cannot protect themselves from the consequences of their violence and immorality. However, it is through each character’s merciless torment, in spite of social standing, that Euripides amplifies the callous nature of invasive and futile conflict.
The most obvious iteration of suffering is manifested in the female characters of the play. Surrounded in the “puddles of blood” that “smear the sanctuaries of all the gods,” these women are the primary victims of a senseless conflict. It is not only Hecuba who “drowns in a sea of misery” but it is all the women who suffer immense traumatic emotional and physical loss. Considered the most vulnerable and feeble in society during this conservative era, Euripides mostly subjects them to the most heinous of fates. Indeed, Cassandra the consecrated virgin is viciously violated and turned into a concubine, a debauched mockery of her coveted position as a Priestess of Athena. Helen is chastised for her scandalous promiscuity, yet tyrannical, authoritarian men such as Agamemnon and Menelaus are lauded for their carelessness for monogamy. Yet, in spite of this, Euripides still confronts this double standard and ironically punishes the most protected men within society: soldiers. Shielded by their own immense strength and apparent valor, their physical prowess is not doubted in the slightest. However, as “officers of his kind...hated by everyone” Talthybius embodies the emotionally troubled soldier who has been forced to endure the immorality that he himself did not know he could possess. This itself is an undervalued plight that some have chosen to ignore in favor of the women’s more blatant “howling and pain no animal can endure.” But Euripides does not dismiss this and portrays him to be a hesitant man who himself is aware that there is no decency in the barbaric murder of child. Coming to grips with their maliciousness, Talthybius is portrayed as someone who can protect themselves on a battlefield but not from the consequences of his lustful superior’s senseless conflict.
Euripides spares no victims in this tragedy as the victors are also considered vulnerable and condemned to face their own personal trauma. The prideful and wanton Menelaus is forced to endure the loss of his soldiers whose “blood and guts have been tested and spent” to reclaim his wife. Whilst some may argue that his life revolved around Helen, a woman who “makes men’s eyes her prisoners,” the retribution he seeks to provide his troops by having her “executed in payment of blood” by his people indicates that this is a man who feels sympathy for their loss of life. In spite of his powerful authority, Menelaus must face the idiocy of his choices and endure both his pain and his people’s pain. The only figures to be spared of a plight are the divinity. Euripides does not highlight their struggle for there is none but instead chooses to emphasize their role in influencing people’s suffering as implied in the fleet’s and city’s destruction. Their capability to adapt a “cavalier change of mind” in the face of minor displeasure and erratic unpredictability deems them to be both fearsome and transcendent to mortals. However, it is this supernatural nature of the gods that places them on a pedestal, thus allowing Euripides to further suppress the low and vulnerable as seen in Hecuba’s anguished cry, “Oh you gods, what good were you to us! Betrayers!”
But this play’s barbarous agony is not without reason. Euripides condemns all these mortal characters to endure these atrocious fates to suggest that conflict is merciless and does not discriminate which victims must suffer the most. Hence, the mere notion of initiating such invasive expeditions is lambasted and considered futile. Indeed, Cassandra’s impassioned monologue highlights the nobility in “fighting for their fatherland” in contrast to the dishonor of invasive violence, as most have given up the “simplest of pleasures” and died on a land far from their own. The audience of his time is implored to explore the illogical nature of prideful and unnecessary conflict for the literal winner of such a war is made to suffer a fate many consider worse than death. Yet Euripides continues to challenge the norms of his time and urges the audience to reconsider the concept of vulnerability. Those who cannot protect themselves are no longer only the women and children but also encompasses the victims of conflict, their husbands, their soldiers, and their esteemed leaders. By brutally punishing everyone, Euripides warns his audience that it is not an impossibility that even those of the highest standing can be “throned in the dust”; what more of a mere mortal of the middle class.
“The Women of Troy” explores the affliction of the vulnerable and acts as a modem through which the audiences are presented the struggles of the victims of a senseless war. However, Euripides’ tragic play ultimately asserts that there are in fact no victors in invasive conflict and certainly no person spared the title of unprotected and the sufferings of the vulnerable.