The Trojan Women Themes

The Trojan Women is set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War. The Trojan War and its fallout are the setting for many of the most famous classical works of literature, including the Iliad, the Aneid, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, and many of Euripides’ surviving plays. Historical accounts of the Trojan War are limited, but in Greek mythology it is described as a ten-year war during which the Greek army laid siege to the city…

The world of The Trojan Women is unpredictable. Fortunes are in constant flux, and fates are turned upside down in the span of days or even hours. A woman can be queen one day, and a slave the next; children can have long lives ahead of them, and then be sentenced to death; a warrior can expect to take a few months to sail home, but instead spend ten years on his journey because the…

Unsurprisingly, given the play’s title, the women in The Trojan Women are its protagonists, and their experiences and suffering are the play’s primary concern. The play was written around 415 BCE, but describes semi-fictional events that supposedly took place 700 years earlier. In Euripides’ day, in Ancient Greece, women had few rights. They were first the property of their fathers, and later of their husbands—and, like slaves of any gender, were ineligible for citizenship. This…