The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Euripides · a tragedy for performance · about 1,330 lines · Athens, City Dionysia, 415 BC, the third play of a group whose other plays are lost · scored on Euripides’ Greek, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Greek quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with the desk’s own close English beneath and Lattimore’s version for sense
Mode
Tragedy as aftermath; a play of endurance and lament in which the action is already over when it begins
Mythos
The sacked city seen from its women after the men are dead: the mother of a destroyed people, the widow, the prophet no one hears, and the cause who survives untouched
Phase
One day after the fall: the women allotted, Cassandra led away, Andromache taken and her son killed, Helen tried and spared, the child buried on his father’s shield, Troy burned and the women sent to the ships
Presentation
Drama for the City Dionysia; a divine prologue, a monody and the sung entry of the chorus, three episodes each followed by a choral ode, and an exodos ending in a sung lament; about 1,330 lines, with three speaking actors
Register
From a cold bargain between gods to a prophet’s wedding hymn, a law-court debate over Helen, a herald’s broken speech and a grandmother’s lament over a child
Scale
One place on one day, with two falls of the same city, three generations of a royal house, an army’s council and the gods who leave
Governing Proposition
Troy has fallen and its men are dead; the women wait by the shore to be given to the Greeks, and their queen, Hecuba, stays before them from the first scene to the last while the victors come and take, one after another, her daughter, her son’s widow, her grandson and the city itself. The wager of the play is that victory in war is a ruin for the victor as for the vanquished, that its cost is paid by those who had no voice in it, and that a tragedy can be built of nothing but what they endure.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on a god leaving a city. Poseidon, who built the walls of Troy, stands before it after the sack and takes his leave of the place he could not save. Athena comes to him. She has turned against her own Greeks, because Ajax did outrage to Cassandra, and she asks Poseidon to wreck their fleet on the way home. Before he goes he says what the play will show: “mōros de thnētōn hostis ekporthei poleis”
“a fool among mortals is he who sacks cities” (95). Every victor who comes on stage after this is already doomed, and the audience knows it.
Then the gods leave, and do not come back. Hecuba, the queen of Troy, rises from the ground in a monody of lament, and the captive women sing their entry to her. From this point to the last line she does not leave the stage. Everything that follows is brought to her, and the play has no other place to stand. The chorus are captives of the same city, and they will go where she goes.
The play was the third of a group at the City Dionysia of 415 BC, after Alexandros and Palamedes, with the satyr play Sisyphus; the other three are lost, the first two but for fragments, and the group took second prize to Xenocles. In the winter before, Athens had taken Melos, killed its men and enslaved its women and children, and in the summer after the festival the Sicilian expedition sailed. Whether the play answers Melos is disputed, since it may have been written before the news. It does not need the answer: the god’s line stands in the prologue whatever its date.
Movement II
The herald Talthybius comes from the Greek camp to tell the women whose they are. The allotment is the play’s first blow and its rule: from here nothing can be reversed, and each scene will take something more. He comes back again and again through the play, the victors’ voice in the women’s place, and each time he brings an order he did not make.
Cassandra, given to Agamemnon, comes out with torches and sings her own wedding hymn. It is ecstasy and death in one figure: the prophet dancing her marriage to the king she will die with. Her torches are wedding torches, and they are the torches of the burning city. Then she stops singing and argues, and her madness reasons. The Trojans who died defending their homes, she says, are happier than the Greeks who died far from theirs, and Troy is the happier city. The victors’ boast is turned inside out by the one woman on stage whom no one will believe.
She is led away. The first loss is the future: the daughter who sees what is coming is taken to the house where it will come. After the scene the chorus sing the night of the Wooden Horse, the city receiving it with dancing and song, and the festival turning to slaughter within the ode. The song is the city’s own memory, sung by women who were in it.
Movement III
Andromache comes in a cart with the spoils of Troy, Hector’s arms among them, and with her son Astyanax. She is given to Neoptolemus. Her loss is the marriage-bed and the hope of a line: the widow of the city’s defender will share the bed of a Greek, and her son is the last of the house.
Then the herald comes back. He can hardly say what he has been sent to say, and his speech breaks before he gives the order: the Greek council has voted that the child be thrown from the walls, for fear of what he might become. A Greek army kills a child for a calculation, and the man who carries the order is ashamed of it. Andromache gives up her son. She tells him to embrace his mother for the last time, and he is taken.
The second loss is the line itself. The chorus sing of an older fall of the same city, when Heracles and Telamon sacked Troy a generation before, and of the gods’ Trojan loves, Ganymede and Tithonus, who did not save it. The fall on stage becomes a pattern that recurs, and the gods who loved the city are shown to have been no help to it before and to be none now.
Movement IV
Menelaus comes for Helen. Hecuba prays: “Zeus, eit’ anankē physeos eite nous brotōn”
“Zeus, whether necessity of nature or the mind of men” (886). The prayer is the strangest line in the play, a queen addressing the god as perhaps a law of nature, perhaps human reason, and it startles Menelaus. The play leaves it beside the literal gods of the prologue and does not choose between them.
Then the form changes. Helen is brought out and a trial is held, with Menelaus as judge: two set speeches of equal weight, in the manner of the law-courts. Helen’s is ingenious. Aphrodite, she argues, is to blame, and the Trojans who raised Paris when he should have died. Hecuba’s answers it and demolishes it. In the middle of a lament the play sets a forensic debate, and the register drops from grief to argument.
Hecuba wins the case and loses it. Menelaus will take Helen home, and desire, not justice, will decide what becomes of her there. The last claim to justice goes with the rest. The chorus sing that Zeus has abandoned the city, and the women turn back to what is left to them.
Movement V
The herald brings the child’s body back on Hector’s shield. The shield, the emblem of the city’s defence, was not taken to Greece; it is to be the boy’s coffin. Talthybius, who carried the order, will help to bury him. Hecuba takes the child and washes his wounds.
Her lament over him is the play’s summit of grief. She speaks to him as over a cradle and a coffin both, and the shield of his father holds him. The play has asked nothing of the audience but to stay where she stays, and here it asks the most. The long lament repeats some of its motions; the place of grief has no exit, and the play does not invent one.
Then Troy is fired, and the towers fall. The women strike the earth to call the dead, and the trumpet sounds for the ships. Hecuba and the chorus go down to the shore together, the last loss taken and nothing left to take. The audience, who heard the god’s promise at the start, knows what waits for the fleet at sea; the women do not, and the play ends with them leaving.
Act III · The Twelve
The play has almost no plot: from the moment the herald allots the women nothing can be reversed, and each episode is another loss. The subtractive test still finds most of it required, because the losses come in order: the future, in Cassandra, who will die with Agamemnon; the marriage-bed and the hope of a line, in Andromache given to Neoptolemus; the line itself, in Astyanax thrown from the walls; the last claim to justice, in the trial of Helen, which Hecuba wins and loses at once; and the city. Remove one and the descent loses a step. Held down by the Helen debate, detachable as the others are not, the second ode’s mythic excursus, and the prologue’s promise of the fleet’s wreck, never taken up within the play.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: victory in war is a ruin for the victor as for the vanquished, and its cost is paid by those who had no voice in it, the women and the child. Poseidon says it in the prologue: “mōros de thnētōn hostis ekporthei poleis”
“a fool among mortals is he who sacks cities” (95). The play then shows it without argument. A Greek army kills a child because a council fears what he might become, and the herald who carries the order is shamed by it and helps to bury him. Cassandra turns the victors’ boast inside out, and the gods are shown absent when the cost comes due. Held off the top only because the disclosure is single, struck again and again, rather than many-sided.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. Cassandra enters with torches and sings her own wedding hymn to Agamemnon, ecstasy and death in one figure; Andromache tells her son to embrace his mother for the last time; the child’s body comes back on Hector’s shield, which the soldiers did not take to Greece, and Hecuba laments over it as over a cradle and a coffin both; at the close Troy burns, the towers fall, the women strike the earth to call the dead, and the trumpet sounds for the ships. The first ode’s night of the Horse, festival turning to slaughter, is a height of its own. Held below the top by the Helen episode’s forensic register, and by an unbroken lament that risks numbness.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not only evoked. The fall of Troy is the archetype of the sacked city, and this play makes it the city as seen from the women after the men are dead, which became its permanent form: Hecuba the mother of a destroyed people, Andromache the widow, Cassandra the prophet no one hears, Helen the cause who survives untouched. The load-bearing images are made in the play: Hector’s shield, the emblem of the city’s defence, become the child’s coffin; Cassandra’s wedding torches that are the torches of the burning; the Horse received with song. The second ode sets this fall against Heracles and Telamon’s sack of the same city, so that the fall becomes a pattern. Held off the top because the figures are inherited from epic, and the play turns them rather than originating them.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Attic tragedy, whose form assumes an action: a choice, a reversal, a recognition. The swerve is a tragedy whose action is over before it begins. The protagonist cannot act; she can only endure, lament and argue. The play replaces plot with succession and puts the victims, women and slaves, where a hero stood; it sets a law-court debate on Helen’s guilt inside the lament, and lets Hecuba’s rationalist prayer startle Menelaus. The stake was real: produced months after Athens took Melos and before the Sicilian expedition sailed, before the people who had voted for both, it took second prize to Xenocles. Held below the top because Euripides’ own Hecuba and Andromache, and Aeschylus’ Persians in showing the defeated, had prepared the turn.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The static form is the argument: captives have no action, and a play that gave them a plot would lie about captivity. Hecuba on stage from the end of the prologue to the close, receiving each blow, makes the audience stay where she stays. The visitors from the Greek camp, the herald again and again and then Menelaus, bring the victors’ world to the women and take from it each time, and the herald’s returns make the form a rhythm of summons. The chorus are the same captives as the actors, so the odes are the city’s own memory, not commentary from outside. The divine prologue frames it all with the knowledge that the Greeks will be wrecked. Held off the top by the Helen debate, partly a container for sophistic display.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: a long history of reading and a twentieth-century explosion of it, with the questions still open. Whether the play answers Melos, or was composed before the news; whether it is a play against war or a play about the gods’ justice and the Greeks’ coming punishment; whether Hecuba wins the Helen debate, or Helen’s case, that Aphrodite and the Trojans who raised Paris are to blame, is left standing; whether the prayer to necessity of nature or the mind of men is piety, philosophy or despair; whether Cassandra is mad or the one clear mind on stage; how far the lost Alexandros and Palamedes reshape it. Held a step down because the central meaning lies close to the surface, and much of the yield is in the play’s use in later wars.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century and the drama of Europe that inherited it. The force is real: the play made the sufferings of the defeated, and of women in war, a full tragic subject without a hero’s action, and showed that tragedy could be built from lament and endurance alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in antiquity Seneca’s Troades took the material to Rome and through it to the Renaissance stage; the great reach is delayed, in the twentieth century, where the play became the theatre’s model for answering war, in Franz Werfel’s version (1915), Gilbert Murray’s translation staged against the First World War, Sartre’s Les Troyennes (1965), Cacoyannis’s film (1971) and a long run since. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and Medea and the Bacchae shaped Euripides’ reception more.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival of some twenty-four centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the play is one of the ten select plays of Euripides transmitted with scholia, in the line that never broke, with the corrupt and suspected lines that every Greek tragedy carries and no missing scene. The lost companion plays are not the unit. The charge is presence. The play was read without break but not continuously performed, and between the Renaissance and 1900 it was among the less regarded of Euripides’ plays, faulted for its lack of plot; since the First World War it has been one of the most performed Greek tragedies in the world. That gap holds it a tenth below a text whole and read without break. It has outlived its conditions entirely: it is staged for every war since its own.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on Euripides’ Greek; the music of the lyrics is lost and is neither credited nor charged. The command shows in the range of means and their placing. The lyric: Hecuba’s monody rising from the ground; Cassandra’s wedding song in excited metres; the first ode’s narrative of the Horse, moving from festival to massacre within the song; the closing lament with its antiphonal cries. The rhetoric: the Helen debate, two set speeches of equal weight, Helen’s ingenious and Hecuba’s demolishing. The scene-making: the cart that brings Andromache with the spoils of Troy and Hector’s arms; the herald’s broken speech before he gives the order; the shield. Held below the top because the descent is paced with less variety than the Bacchae’s, and the long lament of the close repeats some of its motions.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the gods’ cold bargain in the prologue, Athena turning on her own Greeks over a private outrage, and Hecuba washing the child’s wounds. One law holds them: power, divine or human, acts for its own reasons, and the cost is paid by those who cannot act. The Greek council kills Astyanax for a calculation; Athena destroys the Greek fleet for an insult; Menelaus spares Helen for desire; Zeus abandons the city he once loved. The range is wide: theophany, madness, forensic debate, cradle-song, the destruction of a city. Charged: the sophistic register of the Helen debate strains against the lament around it, and the rationalist prayer and the prologue’s literal gods stand side by side, unresolved, at some cost to unity.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on what one play of about 1,330 lines holds. War, as aftermath, which is its whole ground. The state, in the council’s vote on Astyanax and the allotment of the women. The family: a mother, her daughters, Cassandra and Polyxena, whose death is reported, her son’s widow and grandson, the line of Priam ended. Women and slavery, as the condition of nearly every speaker. The sacred, in gods present, invoked, doubted and abandoned. History, in the city’s two falls and the Greeks’ return still ahead. Law, in the trial of Helen; desire, in Helen and Menelaus. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour and the natural order are thin, and one day in one place bounds how fully these orders can be worked out.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.2 and The Made at 9.0. A text whole and in the line that never broke, now staged for every war; a disclosure that victory ruins the victor and is paid for by those who had no voice, spoken once by a god and then shown without argument; and a command of monody, ode, debate and scene placed to carry the descent.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: war, the state, the family, slavery, the sacred and law are worked in one day at one place, and labour and the natural order are thin. Below the rest of the gated axes, The Inevitable at 8.3: a play built of loss after loss, in which the Helen debate is detachable, the second ode’s excursus ornamental, and the prologue’s promise of the wreck never taken up.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the aggregate, at 8.8, stands below the summit’s 9.0, and the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Euripides’ Troades in the Greek, scored as the surviving text for performance: the play alone, as transmitted, about 1,330 lines in modern editions, whole, with corrupt and suspected lines and no missing scene. It was produced at the City Dionysia of 415 BC as the third play of a connected group with Alexandros and Palamedes, both lost but for fragments, and the satyr play Sisyphus, lost; those plays are context only, and are neither credited nor charged. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Euripides’ Greek. Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, transliterated, with the desk’s own close rendering beneath; line references are to the standard numbering. Translation · Richmond Lattimore’s version (Chicago, Euripides III, 1958), read for sense and for the play in English; it is not quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the play. The music and dance of the odes are lost to every reader, and the metres of the lyrics are not judged from memory; neither is credited nor charged. Whether the play answers the taking of Melos is disputed and bears on no figure. Matters that could not be verified, among them the source of the record of the prize, the exact line count, the date of the first printing and some line references within the Helen debate, are not given.