The play is a picture of the inner side of a great conquest, a thing which then, even more than now, formed probably the very heart of the dreams of the average unregenerate man. It is a thing that seemed beforehand to be a great joy, and is in reality a great misery. It is conquest seen when the heat of battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait and think; conquest not embodied in those who achieved it—we have but one glimpse of the Greek conquerors, and that shows a man contemptible and unhappy—but in those who have experienced it most fully, the conquered women.
We have so far treated the Trojan Women as though it stood alone. In reality of course it belonged to a group, and one cannot but ask what the other plays were, and whether their themes were such as could stand beside this and not be shrivelled into commonplace or triviality. Fortunately, though the plays are both lost, we know something about them. They were Palamedes and Alexander; and both are on great subjects. The Palamedes tells of the righteous man condemned by an evil world; the Alexander has for its hero a slave.
Slavery had always been one of the subjects that haunted Euripides. We do not happen to find in our remains of his work any definite pronouncement that slavery is "contrary to nature," as was held by most Greek philosophers of the succeeding century. Probably no practical man of the time could imagine a large industrial city living without the institution of slavery. But it is clear that Euripides hates it. It corrupts a man; it makes the slave cowardly and untrustworthy. Yet "many slaves are better men than their masters"; "many so-called free men are slaves at heart." And again, in the style of a Stoic, "A man without fear cannot be a slave" (fr. 958: cf. fr. 86, 511, etc.). Much more important than such statements as these, which are, according to his manner, generally put in the mouth of a slave, are the many instances of "sympathetic" and courageous slaves, and the panegyrics on men who have no slaves but work with their own hands. These show the bent of the poet's mind. It is not, however, till the year of the Trojan Women that he takes the bold step of actually making a slave his hero and filling his play with discussions of slavery, including a definite contest in aretê between the slaves and the masters. True, the slave turns out in the end to be a prince. The herdsman whose favourite bull the young nobles have seized for a sacrifice, and who pursues and challenges and eventually conquers them in strength and skill as well as magnanimity, turns out to be Alexander, son of Priam, who has been reared by the slave herdsmen of Mt. Ida. By our standards that is a pity. We should have preferred him a real slave. But probably on the Greek stage thus much of romance was inevitable, and after all it had its connection with real life. Many a Scythian and Thracian and even Phrygian chief, like this Alexander, must have stood for sale in Greek slave markets.
The root idea of the Palamedes, the righteous man falsely slain, has a momentous place in the history of Greek thought. It starts, of course, as a bitterness or a paradox. Righteousness to the fifth century Athenian was almost identical with social service, and, in a healthy society with normal conditions, the man who serves his city well will naturally be honoured by his city. But then comes the thought, itself fraught with the wisdom of the sophists: "What if the multitude is bent on evil, or is blind? There are many men who are evil but seem righteous; what if the man who is righteous seems to be evil?" Hence come the story of Aias in Pindar, and Palamedes in this play, and the ideal Righteous Man of Plato's Republic who "shall be scourged, tortured, bound . . . and at last impaled or crucified" (Rep. p. 362a). The idea runs through the various developments of later Greek mysticism and attains its culminating point in Christianity. It is in full concord with the tone of the Trojan Women.
We know little of the Palamedes. That hero was the true wise man, and his enemy was Odysseus, the evil man who "seemed wise" and had the ear of the multitude. Palamedes is falsely accused of treason, condemned by the unanimous voice of his judges and sent to death. Fragments tell us of some friend, perhaps a prisoner, carving message after message upon oar-blades and throwing them into the sea that the truth might be known; and we have two beautiful untranslatable lines uttered by the Chorus: "Ye have slain, ye Greeks, ye have slain the nightingale; the wingèd-one of the Muses who sought no man's pain." Tradition saw in the words a reference to the wise Protagoras, lately slandered to his death.
The consideration of these other plays of the same trilogy strengthens the impression that I receive already from the Trojan Women, an impression of some deepening of experience, some profound change that has worked into the writer's soul. Other critics, and notably Wilamowitz and Mr. Glover, have similarly felt that this play marks a turning point. It was not a change of front; it was not sudden; it was not dependent on visions or supernatural messages. It was the completion of a long process of strong feeling and intense thought, not the less sane because of its decided element of mysticism. It probably differed in many ways from the sudden and conscious conversions which began the ministry of certain Greek philosophers, both Cynic and Stoic, in the fourth and third centuries before Christ. It differed still more from the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus or Augustine beneath the fig-tree. But it does seem to me that in this tragedy the author shows a greatly increased sense of some reality that is behind appearances, some loyalty higher than the claims of friends or country, which supersedes as both false and inadequate the current moral code and the current theologies.