Like countless writers before and after him, 5th-Century Athenian playwright Euripides created his story around the presumed facts of the Trojan War, as outlined by Homer. Euripides, like all the ancient Greeks, accepted both the events and personalities of the Trojan War, hundreds of years before Euripides’ time, as historical fact. His play about the imagined female victims of the war was not simply taken as a parable, or myth, but the staged, admittedly dramatized, portrayal of real events.
But was Euripides right to believe he was writing about the lives of real women? Historians have long debated the veracity of the Trojan War, with many in the modern era believing the story to be nothing more than an elaborate legend. By the late 19th-Century, indeed, it was generally assumed that “Troy” had never even existed.
Yet groundbreaking archeology from 1870 to the present day has reversed that picture. As recently as 2001, a geologist from the University of Delaware announced new findings corroborating many of the details found in Homer. After centuries of being dismissed, “it is now more likely than not” that there were “several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age,” according to Archeology.org.
Does that mean there was a war started by a beauty named Helen, or that a mother named Hecuba lost all her children to war, or that a woman named Amiable once fondled a broken toaster oven? Probably not. More probable is that after a vicious war, the Trojan women of a destroyed civilization were subject to the whims and abuses of their male Greek conquerors. Thus Euripides’—and, therefore, our—play has a likely all-too-real, unfortunate historical basis. This is not just the stuff of myths.
--Jeff Stein
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