A Tragedy Paper

The Trojan women by Euripides

The earliest tragedies were part of the Attic religious festivals held in honor of the god Dionysus (5th cent. B.C.). The ritual entailed the presentation of four successive plays (three tragedies, one comedy). Each was based on situations and characters drawn from myth, and the tragedies ended in catastrophe for the heroes and heroines. The most famous ancient tragedies are probably the Oresteia (a trilogy) of Aeschylus, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and Euripides' Trojan Women. Euripides was an ancient Greek dramatist. He was the author of numerous tragedies, including the Bacchae, Medea, and The Trojan Women. He often used the device of deus ex machina to resolve his plots. Pictorial images of the pity and suffering of war are daily with us. But it is debatable whether they are as powerful as the 2,400-year-old verbal and visual images conjured by Greek play (in Ancient Greek), Euripides' tragedy Trojan Women (415 BC). Tragedy can also be a vision of life, one shared by most Western cultures and having its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To reflect this wider sense of the human dilemma, where men feel compelled to confront evil, yet where evil prevails, a second dramatic tradition evolved. Its roots go back once again to religious drama, in this case the mystery and morality plays of medieval England, France, and Germany (see miracle play; morality play). Unlike classical drama, these plays, of which Everyman is the best known, emphasize the accountability of ordinary people. Even plays about the divine Christ stress human suffering and sacrifice.

In Trojan Women, Euripides constructed around Hekabe one of the most powerful studies of the psychological and physical aftermath of war to emerge from the ancient world. To hear it in the Greek of Socrates and Pericles, spoken with all the impact ...