Shirley Barlow

Euripides: Trojan Women Shirley Barlow

Trojan Women is very much a play for our times. Strongly against war, it shows its aftermath through the eyes of a group of women, members of the Trojan royal household. They have experienced displacement, degradation and deprivation as their city has been sacked by the Greeks. The play expresses their protest, their articulation of grief, their reflection upon the world they now find themselves in, one in which the more they suffer the more their love for each other and for the family they have lost is strengthened. Trojan Women is concentrated in its emotive power and its uniquely lyric quality and it is not without the irony either that the positions of victors and vanquished are not always as fixed or as irreversible as they seem. Greek text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.