Trojan Women Euripides Quotes

Soon all of you immortals Will be as dead as we are! Come on then, what are you waiting for? Have you run out of thunderbolts?

That 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.

There liveth not in my life any more The hope that others have. Nor will I tell The lie to mine own heart, that aught is well Or shall be well…. Yet, O, to dream were sweet!

...I'd never want my muse to be a singer of nothing but disaster.

Death cannot be what Life is, Child; the cup Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope.

Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!

And whatso man they call Happy, believe not ere the last day fall!

Oh, great king with your dreams of grandeur yet to come/ vile as you are so shall your end be.

My legs are trembling, but I won't fall

Human misery must somewhere have a stop:             there is no wind that always blows a storm;             great good fortune comes to failure in the end.

necessity breaks even the strong.

No, child, you’re wrong. They’re not the same. Life means hope, death is nothing at all.

CASSANDRA: Down to the dead I go victorious, ruining the house of Atreus that ruined us.

The man who would prefer great wealth or strength             more than love, more than friends, is diseased of soul.

when all fears of a possible worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory.

That man who feels safe in his blessings and rejoices is a fool.

An homecoming that striveth ever more And cometh to no home.

The end, the tale of what happened to the Trojan women when Troy fell, comes from a play by Sophocles’ fellow playwright, Euripides. It is a curious contrast to the martial spirit of the Aeneid. To Virgil as to all Roman poets, war was the noblest and most glorious of human activities. Four hundred years before Virgil a Greek poet looked at it differently. What was the end of that far-famed war? Euripides seems to ask. Just this, a ruined town, a dead baby, a few wretched women.

What epitaph, I wonder, would a poet write for him?

You stupid, bestial mortals Making war, burning cities, Violating tombs and temples, Torturing your enemies, Bringing suffering on yourselves, Can't you see War Will kill all of you?

When Euripides wrote about the Trojan War, he centred his plays on the female characters: Andromache, Electra, Helen, Hecabe, and two Iphigenia plays, offering different, contradictory versions of her fate.

Even if Helen and Paris had resisted the power of Aphrodite (which Zeus himself can’t manage), then war would still have come between east and west, Greece and Troy, because the gods had already decided that it was necessary. And this idea, that the war was fought irrespective of Helen, is one which ancient writers played around with. Not least, Euripides. In his play Helen, he presents a very different version of Helen’s story from the one we see in The Trojan Women. Helen was first performed in 412 BCE,23 three years after The Trojan Women, which had asked so many unsettling questions about the nature of war and the devastation it wreaks on the lives of victims and victors alike.

Θνητῶν δέ μωρός ὅστις εὖ πράσσειν δοκῶν βέβαια χαίρει· τοῖς τρόποις γάρ αἱ τύχαι, ἔμπληκτος ὡς ἄνθρωπος, ἄλλοτ' ἄλλοσε πηδῶσι, κουδείς αὐτός εὐτυχεῖ ποτέ.

The Trojan Women “[t]he greatest piece of anti-war literature there is in the world… Nothing since, no description or denunciation of war’s terrors and futilities, ranks with The Trojan Women, which was put upon the Athenian stage by Euripides in the year 416 BC.

Female characters were often central figures in ancient versions of these stories. The playwright Euripides wrote eight tragedies about the Trojan War which survive to us today. One of them, Orestes, has a male title character. The other seven have women as their titles: Andromache, Electra, Hecabe, Helen, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taureans and The Trojan Women.

Ô dieux du ciel! On ne peut pas compter sur leur secours, mais il convient de les prier dans l'infortune.

Être mort, ne pas être né s'équivalent, je pense, et mieux vaut mourir que de vivre dans la douleur.