Women of Troy - Research Paper Example

The tragedy experienced in this play is one of a kind and perfectly blended to break even the coldest of hearts and melt them as butter melts before a hot iron. Euripides takes time to curve out the tragedy from the mythical Greek legends and out of it comes a masterpiece that can only be compared with Homer’s Iliad, verses from Sophocles and also Aeschlylus. It has been a Greek thing to write beautiful stories of heroes and gods but nothing beats the Greeks at bringing out emotions in people as such with tragedies.

In as much as most of the former plays of those times used unskilled performers and actors, the Grecian playwrights such as Homer still drove the point home by employing numerous theatrical techniques to keep their audience satisfied and entertained (Kirk, 20). At the onset of the events of that led to the Trojan War, Athena, Hera and Aphrodite are seen to fight over the rights of the fairest of them all. Zeus, the king of all gods, send the three goddesses to the Trojan prince Paris who then chooses Aphrodite and in return she makes Helen the fairest of women in Sparta winning the heart of Paris, and what follows next is one of the epic battles to ever go down in the Grecian history and history of the world.

It is from this epic battle that we get to learn of the Trojan women and their plights before and after the war. Hecuba, the queen of Troy, wife to Priam and mother to Hector and Paris, is the first one to enter the stage full of grief and lamenting for the deaths of his two sons and husband and the fall of Troy. Later on, after the news from the Grecian herald of woe Talthybius, enters the cursed Cassandra with the ability to foresee the future but otherwise incapable of wooing her adversaries to believe her and she later ends up dying in the house of her Greek Patron.

Then enters Andromache full of tears for her dead husband Hector and soon after her son is killed by