Women of Troy: the first anti-war play? | Art Works

Women of Troy, an ancient Greek play by Euripides, is considered by some to be the first anti-war play. A new Australian production, adapted by Tom Wright and Barrie Kosky - and with a musical score by Katie Noonan and libretto by Behrouz Boochani - seeks to reflect on displaced people today. #ArtWorksABC

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Hosted by Namila Benson, Art Works is the ABC's weekly half-hour arts show sharing the most inspiring, surprising, and formative ways that Australian creatives are telling our stories today.

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[TheKeeperoftheGarden]

1. Euripides was a genius. A lot of his plays feature strong women and show how he must have studied the psychology of women. Contrary to how Aristophanes represented him in one of his comedies, namely as a misogynist, Euripides must have been fascinated by - at least - many women featuring in ancient legends and the epic story of the Iliad (The Trojan War). Aristophanes most probably used irony and showed him as the opposite of what he really was, perhaps a precursor of a male feminist, at least someone who respected women and was intrigued by their psyche.
2. As Euripides' play is a 5th century BCE theatrical "rendering" of a part of the end of the Iliad, the epic story about the Trojan War, presumed to have been written by Homeros, some two or three centuries before, which in turn was a literary and poetic version of what must have been an orally transmitted epic story originating in the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation, it is incorrect to talk about "Greek" generals and the "Greek" army. Homeros nor Euripides used the terms "Greek" or "Greece", as they are Roman names, and rather derogatory ones on top of that! We should speak about Hellas and Hellenes whilst realising even these terms are not completely correct since the Trojan War took place within the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean world. Homeros in the Iliad uses a variety of names to identify the "Greek" tribes participating in the war against Troy, showing us that "Greeks", "Greece", and the "Greek army" in those times simply didn't exist. What was binding these populations together was - apart from certain identical styles in art and craftsmanship, common commercial interests, identical palace-centred economies, and a number of identical architectural achievements - the language, which should be called "Mycenaean" and not "Greek", as the earliest form of what we usually call "Ancient Greek" is in fact "Mycenaean" and dates from the middle of the third millennium BCE. Proof of this lies in the vocabulary of the Linear-B texts on clay tablets from (mainly) the archives of the Mycenaean palace of Pylos.
3. I object to what is usually thought and countlessly repeated almost everywhere about how women in those times were deemed to be "inferior" to men. They were not. The Mycenaean origins of the Iliad, the Iliad itself, and the rendering of the end of the war in Euripides' play "The Women of Troy" were all born in a very different society than the current "Western" one. Since tens of thousands of years men and women had very different roles, functions, and responsibilities in those ancient societies. Those differences had been shaped by evolution, nature, and the physical and topographical context of those (prehistoric and early historic) societies. One example of how women were certainly not seen as "inferior" but had different roles than men in society, is the fact that women, from prehistoric times until at least Classical and Hellenistic Greece, had the full ownership of the houses, farms, and fields (!), had total control over anything concerning the household and the distribution of tasks between the servants and workforce, and played a major role in religious rituals, festivals, and anything related to giving birth and preparing the deceased for his or her burial! Apart from these proven facts on the mainland of Greece, there are more and more indications of how the Minoan civilisation on the island of Crete was - at least until its final phase - probably not ruled by kings but by queens... There are also reasons to believe that in the Mycenaean civilisation on the mainland, before the importance of male soldiers and warriors became all-important in its final phase (the time of the Trojan War...), women and priestesses played a major part in society, religion, and art, as can be seen from a number of wall paintings that were rescued from the citadels, palaces, and temples of Mycenae and Tiryns. Women were seen as different because their role in society was different. Nowadays, in Western societies, the roles and functions of men and women are overlapping, at least partially. That did not happen until quite late in human history. We should not judge ancient societies by current-day standards.

[Albemarle]

Eurpides"es technique was to portray legendary characters as ordinary humans caught in up in extreme situations.