Answer the following questions on Trojan Women. Answer each using 150+ words.
(No heading or bibliography needed)
1) At the opening of the play, the Trojan women are waiting for the Greek commanders to cast lots to divvy up the spoils, which includes the women themselves who will become slaves in Greek households. But later, when Talthybius come to retrieve Astyanax and lead him to his death, we find out that the Greeks “decreed by vote” that Astyanax should be killed (785). Odysseus, Talthybius reports, convinced everyone not to let Hector’s son grow up.
How do you suppose the Athenian audience responded to this reference to democracy?
2) Early in the play Hecuba lays out for us her options as a conquered queen, widow, and now slave, and she explains her reasoning for vocalizing her grief: “Why should I keep silence? But why speak?” (110-1) The reasoning: The Greeks might not like it if I utter these bad omens and pray to the gods, but they cannot possibly hurt me anymore than they already have, so why keep silent. Then again, why bother to say anything at all because what good will it do?
Hecuba goes on the speak her truth, exploring the depths of her grief and the suffering of all the surviving women. Of all Euripides’ plays, this one seems to plumb the darkest, grimmest places in the human heart, and Hecuba is the epicenter of that. Anyone who thinks tragedy as an art form is about making suffering beautiful can’t have read this play; only a few lines later, Hecuba says, “For someone in my state, this counts as music: / sobbing desolation: a noise no one can dance to” (120-1). This is not the Dionysian revels (let’s get drunk and dance the sorrows away) many in Euripides’ audience might have come to expect–or wish for. It’s desolate, gutting anguish. Much later in the play, looking at the broken body of Astyanax laid out on Hector’s shield, Hecuba says, “I won’t hide the horror” (1177). Look. See it, she demands.
What does this play suggest about the relationship between grief and the theater of tragedy?
3) Euripides’ play climaxes with a rhetorical contest between Helen and Hecuba, two women who have no authority of their own, making their respective cases to the Spartan Menelaus, cuckolded husband and ruthless conqueror. Hecuba wins. She shuts down all of Helen’s arguments and convinces her captor Menelaus to order her execution.
We know, as the audience in Athens would have, that Menelaus will change his mind. Hecuba’s other prophecy will come true: Helen will win back his favor with her beauty and charm. She will be forgiven. At the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus visits Sparta and is welcomed by the happy, reunited couple; Helen explains that she was out of her mind when she went off with Paris, and Menelaus basically says “Women, what are you going do?”
In The Trojan Women, Euripides allows Hecuba, now a slave, to exert some form of revenge on Helen as a final act before being hauled off by Odysseus, who is seen as the worst of the Greeks for his own ability to persuade and deceive as well as his very cold and calculating argument to kill Astyanax. It’s a false sense of revenge, but it does momentarily give the vanquished queen a chance to speak on level terms with the Greek conqueror.
Keeping in mind that the Athenian audience had experienced both sides of war over their ten-year struggle against Sparta, what do you think Euripides is doing giving so much attention to the women of Troy, to their ability to speak persuasively in the midst of their immense grief?
