The Trojan women of Euripides | Page 2

only
movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar
lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a suggestion that in the
utterness of night, when all fears of a possible worse thing are passed,
there is in some sense peace and even glory. But the situation itself has
at least this dramatic value, that it is different from what it seems.
The consummation of a great conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans
and thanksgivings, the very height of the day-dreams of unregenerate
man--it seems to be a great joy, and it is in truth a great misery. It is
conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but
to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the
conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men,
after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for
Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has
named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit
and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless
and barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.
Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull,
but that it is too harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the
due limits of tragic art. There are points to be pleaded against this
criticism. The very beauty of the most fearful scenes, in spite of their
fearfulness, is one; the quick comfort of the lyrics is another, falling
like a spell of peace when the strain is too hard to bear (cf. p. 89). But
the main defence is that, like many of the greatest works of art, the
Troädes is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a bearing of
witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks outside
the regular ways of the artist.
For some time before the Troädes was produced, Athens, now entirely
in the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which,
though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the
more humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the

great crucial crime of the war. She had succeeded in compelling the
neutral Dorian island of Mêlos to take up arms against her, and after a
long siege had conquered the quiet and immemorially ancient town,
massacred the men and sold the women and children into slavery.
Mêlos fell in the autumn of 416 B.C. The Troädes was produced in the
following spring. And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying
destruction at sea for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of
Mêlos, flushed with conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable
taint of sacrilege, was actually preparing to set sail for its fatal
enterprise against Sicily.
Not, of course, that we have in the Troädes a case of political allusion.
Far from it. Euripides does not mean Mêlos when he says Troy, nor
mean Alcibiades' fleet when he speaks of Agamemnon's. But he writes
under the influence of a year which to him, as to Thucydides, had been
filled full of indignant pity and of dire foreboding. This tragedy is
perhaps, in European literature, the first great expression of the spirit of
pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle; a principle which has
made the most precious, and possibly the most destructive, elements of
innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of at least
two great religions.
Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the
organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted
Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute
powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of
contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of
recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often
mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of
light. It brings not peace, but a sword.
So it was with Euripides. The Troädes itself has indeed almost no
fierceness and singularly little thought of revenge. It is only the crying
of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music, as it were,
and made beautiful by "the most tragic of the poets." But its author
lived ever after in a deepening atmosphere of strife and even of hatred,
down to the day when, "because almost all in Athens rejoiced at his

suffering," he took his way to the remote valleys of Macedon to write
the Bacchae and to die.
G. M.

THE TROJAN WOMEN
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
THE GOD POSEIDON.
THE GODDESS PALLAS