A DRAMA FOR THE YEAR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16372, 28 October 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

A DRAMA FOR THE YEAR.

THE TROJAN WOMEN OF EURIPIDES. A CREEK TRAGEDY. " Tin; Trojan Women" is not an ordinary play; it is the tragedy of women in war, written for all time in tender and glorious poetry. It brings homo to us what women arc suffering now in Belgium and Servia and Poland and Armenia. It faces the facts sincerely; yet it shows us no horrors, and aims at no harrowing effects : the faultless taste of the Fifth Century Athenian detested both sensationalism and sentiment. But it shows the facts transfigured in the beauty of the women's tenderness and the glory of their steadfastness. "' The Trojan Women' is the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world, wrought into music, and made beautiful by 'the most tragic of the noets,'" says Professor Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. "'The Trojan Women' is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a bearing of witness." Euripides wrote the play when he was over sixty. He had served his country for forty years as a soldier; he was a patriot, and would serve her still with his pen. He saw Athens deteriorating during the long, and so far successful, war with Sparta; becoming self-satisfied and careless, greedy in commerce, selfish in private life. And only the year before this play appeared Athens had justified his worst fears, by her deliberate violation of the neutrality of Melos, the Belgium of the /Egean. Point by point the story of this incident, as told by Thucydidcs, might be the story of Germany and Belgium in 1914. Thucydides saw in it the beginning .of the end of Athens' greatness, Euripides saw it 100, and tried to warn his country by re-telling the old story of the conquest of Troy. In his book, " Euripides and His Age," Professor Gilbert Murray says:— j " Thucydides selected the war on Melos i as a type of sin leading to punishment--that sin of 'Hubris,' or Pride, which, according to Greek ideas, was associated with some heaven-sent blindness and pointed straight to a fall." Melos was tree to submit or be destroyed— Belgium. The Melians ask, "Is it quite safe for Athens to break all laws of right''" "The immediate question is whether you prefer to live or die," answer the Athenians. The Melians plead to remain neutral; which is of course refused. Thucydides continues his story: " They put 'to death all the Melians whom they found of man's j estate, and made slaves of the women and j children." Even as the German did with the women of Lille. "In spite of a thousand differences of social organisation and religious dogma, the atmosphre on which Greek tragedy was based embodied tho most fundamental Greek conceptions of life and fate, of law and sin and punishment. For sheer beauty of writing, "The Trojan Women" stands first perhaps among all the works of Euripides. The action works up first to a great empty scene where the child's body is brought back to his grandmother, Hecuba, lor funeral rites. A solitary old woman with a dead child in her arms—that, on the human side, is the result of all these deeds of glory! In tho finale Troy lias already been set on fire by the Greeks in preparation for their departure. The Greek trumpet sounds through the darkness. It is a sign for the women to start for their ships; and forth they go, cheated of every palliative, cheated even of death, to the new life of slavery." Yet the gods were just. Says Thucydides:-" And the ; same winter the Athenians sought to sail [with a greater fleet than over before and conquer Sicily. ..." This was the great Sicilian expedition that , brought Athens to her doom. The characters of this war drama are :— Pallas Athene, Goddess of Wisdom and of War, hitherto Patroness of the Greeks; Hecuba, widowed Queen of Priam, King of Ilion (Troy); Cassandra, her daughter. a virgin priestess of Apollo, and a prophetess; Andromache, widow of Hector, and daughter-in-law to Hecuba; Astyanax. her child, the little Prince and heir of Ilion (Troy); Talthybius, a herald or ambassador from the Greek army. And, in conclusion, how applicable and appropriate at the present time are the following lines: — How are ye blind," Ye treaders down of Cities: ye thai cast Temples to desolation and lay waste Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries whore Ho The ancient dead, yourselves so soon to die.