Amelia M Bensch-Schaus (University of Pennsylvania)
The prologue of the Trojan Women has struck critics as highly unusual because of its incongruity with the actions that follow (Wilson, Rodighiero). The play begins with Athena and Poseidon, who do not mention the women whom the drama actually concerns but instead plan how to destroy the Greek forces in the future. As Dunn has shown, the opening scene functions more like a conclusion. This prologue does not introduce the tragedy’s events but rather undercuts them. This paper examines the tension between prologue and plot in light of the epic allusions throughout the play. Euripides is not simply being contrarian in his prologue, but uses this formal element to explore a gap that the epic tradition, despite its seeming comprehensiveness, has left for tragedy to fill.
The Trojan Women draws its main characters from the four women who lament over Hector’s body at Iliad 24.699-775, and the actors appear in the same order and voice the same concerns that they bring up in the epic (Marshall). Davidson has recently likened the entire play to “a moving footnote to the Iliad itself,” yet this view cannot encompass the opening scene. While the prologue does not relate to the Iliad, it does allude to other epics, namely the νόστοι narratives, particularly the Odyssey. By contrasting allusions to the close of the Iliad in the action of the play with a prologue that looks further ahead in the epic cycle, Euripides reveals the incongruity between these poems, since subsequent epics do not provide the closure that the end of the Iliad demands. If his play is a footnote, it is a necessary one that the epic cycle left unwritten.
While the epic allusions in the prologue remain unexplored, they highlight how the epic tradition progresses straight from the fall of Troy to the νόστοι, leaving out the Trojan women. Athena and Poseidon are concerned with punishing the Greeks, especially Ajax the Lesser, whose death was depicted in the lost Nostoi as well as the Odyssey (4.499-511). The format of the prologue itself alludes to the epic type scene of the divine council, and the opening of the Odyssey provides a particularly compelling parallel, since there the gods discuss Greek νόστοι and peacefully conclude the conflict between Athena and Poseidon. In his play, Euripides creates tension between these same gods by placing them on opposite sides of the Trojan War, and then resolves their decade-long dispute with marked politeness (Lloyd). The gods are ready to leave Troy and begin the νόστοι narratives, including the Odyssey, which Cassandra will in fact epitomize shortly afterwards (431-443). Yet the plot of the play frustrates this divine and traditional impetus, as Euripides instead pivots back to the ending of the Iliad to focus on the fulfilled fears the Trojan women are suffering. There is no real resolution or remedy to their grief, and when viewed as sequels to the Iliad, Euripides shows his audience how wholly unsatisfactory subsequent epics are.