A powerful look at the lives of a people destroyed by military conflict, from the writer Aristotle called “the most tragic of poets.”
Produced in 415 BC, The Trojan Women is a remarkable look at human suffering in the aftermath of war. Unlike The Iliad and The Odyssey, which focus on the Greek victors of the Trojan War, Euripides shines his moral imagination on the Trojan survivors: the women held captive by the Greek army. Showcasing the tragedian’s empathy for the plight of the female victims, The Trojan Women gives the modern reader a view into the grief of Hecuba, a grandmother who lost generations of her family, and the grace of Andromache, who endures the hardship of living as a slave and a concubine at the hands of the enemy. Profound and provocative in his examination of the brutality of his own countrymen, Euripides’s The Trojan Women offers a searing viewpoint on the horrors of war by giving voice to a people grappling with the destruction of an entire way of life.
