Fate, Fortune, and the Gods Theme Analysis

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 gods choose to lengthen his journey. From the smallest child to the most powerful king, Euripides again and again argues that fortunes are changeable and tragedy indiscriminate. Even the Greek gods, who are capable of influencing events on earth, and who could be expected to act as a moderating, steadying force, are emotional and unpredictable in their behavior. Although all-powerful, the gods of mythology, like mortals, have egos, emotions, insecurities and power struggles that guarantee their manipulation of mortal lives is biased, capricious, and entirely unforeseeable. As a result, the fate of the humans they watch over is necessarily unpredictable as well. Over and over again, Euripides demonstrates that fate is fickle, out of the hands of even the omnipotent gods and goddesses, who, in fact, use their influence to further upend earthly fortunes.

In the world of The Trojan Women, the gods are characters with personal stakes in the outcome of the Trojan War. As a result, their actions on earth reflect their own biases and ego trips, as they use the mortal conflict to prove their own superiority. War, which is already full of twists, turns, and reversals, becomes more full of surprises when immensely powerful figures like Poseidon, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite are able to reach into the action and supernaturally manipulate events. These gods, who are ostensibly above petty feuds, are in fact more concerned with whether or not their side wins than with the massive loss of human life enabled by the war they’ve allowed to continue. Poseidon, who backed the Trojans, laments that “The will of Argive Hera and Athena won / its way against my will.” Although relative to a mortal he is all-powerful, he is still in conflict against other, more willful or more powerful gods, who successfully backed the Greek army. Later, Menelaus and Helen argue about how much influence the gods had in her elopement with Paris. Helen argues that she was controlled by Aphrodite, and cannot be held accountable for her actions, as the gods themselves are powerless against fate and, in this case, against Aphrodite as well. Like mortals, the gods are locked in constant struggles for power, which color their actions and decisions. Helen illustrates this when she tells Menelaus, “Challenge the goddess then; show your strength greater than Zeus, / who has the other gods in his power, and still is slave / to Aphrodite alone! Shall I not be forgiven?” The gods can influence life and fortunes on earth, but generally choose not to intervene. They let the women suffer although they could prevent it. They seem to only influence the life of mortals when they themselves have been offended. For example, Hera and Athena only sided with the Greeks because they were offended that Paris had chosen Aphrodite over them in a beauty contest. Similarly, Athena turns against the Greeks when she discovers that they have “outraged my temple, and shamed me.” As a result, Athena vows to “do some evil to them” so that the “Greeks may learn how to use with fear / my sacred places, and respect all gods beside.” She, like the other gods, has no real loyalty to anyone but herself.

The Trojan Women shows readers that fortune and status are unpredictable—indeed, it often seems the only predictable aspect of a person’s fortune is that it will surely be reversed. From the beginning, Hecuba laments her changing fate. Although all remaining Trojan women are now slaves, Hecuba was once a queen, and therefore her fall from grace is especially tragic. However, as sad as it is, she understands that nothing is permanent, and she could eventually have her former power restored. Hecuba asserts, “The mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life / has any strong foundation; since our fortune’s course / of action is the reeling way a madman takes, / and no one person is ever happy all the time.” At another point in the play she reminds herself to essentially “go with the flow.” Because she understands that nothing is permanent, she believes it is easier to “Stoop to the changing fortune. / Steer for the crossing and your fortune, / hold not life’s prow on the course against / wave beat and accident” than to fight against powerful forces, whose motivations and directions she is unable to predict or overcome.

Aside from the gods, Cassandra is the only character who knows and can see her fate, and the fates of those around her. Her fate and fortune fluctuate just like anyone else’s, but she has the ability to know in advance. A useful talent in theory, in reality her prophesies are a curse; she is able to see the future but with one caveat — no one will ever believe her. Frequently, she acts as a stand-in for contemporary audiences, who would have known the basic contours of the plot before the play began. Contemporary audiences, like Cassandra, could essentially see the play’s future, but would similarly be powerless to affect it. This only serves to amplify the story’s tragedy; when fates prove predictable, they almost always prove to be tragic. A foreknowledge of events is not enough to help characters avoid disaster. For example, Cassandra predicts that Odysseus “will go down to the water of death, and return alive to reach his home and thousand sorrows waiting there.” The audience already knows this based on their knowledge of the Odyssey, and on the gods’ discussion of this curse earlier in the play, but nothing can be done to divert his journey. Similarly, Cassandra recounts the tragedy of Agamemnon, which audiences would know from Aeschylus’ play and from mythology. She predicts “great Agamemnon / has won a wife more fatal than ever Helen was. / Since I will kill him, and avenge my brothers’ blood / and my father’s in the desolation of his house.” However, even though Cassandra knows that her enslavement by Agamemnon will end in bloodshed, she knows she cannot escape her fate. There is nothing to do but march forward into disaster.

In the world of the Trojan Women, the future is often unknowable, and even those who know or can influence the future, like the prophet Cassandra or the gods themselves, are unable or unwilling to manipulate fortune in any logical way. The audience, too, is left powerless to help, as they watch the play’s characters careen towards tragedy. The play is concerned with the bleakness of war, and it also seems to be concerned with the bleakness of fate. In a story told a thousand times, the characters are incapable of escaping their futures, and as slaves they are similarly powerless. As a writer, Euripides has no real way to relieve their suffering. Instead, he emphasizes how full of chance and surprise life can be — although yesterday the women of Troy were princesses and today they are slaves, tomorrow they could be queens again. The Greek victors are heroes today, but tomorrow they could be lost at sea. Even in a play based on stories hundreds of years old, the future is not set in stone.