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Women's Role In Euripides The Trojan Women

805 Words4 Pages

Euripides’ The Trojan Women expresses the disbelief and hope of ancient Greek women during the Trojan war. The characterization and dialogue between Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra, shows the role of women in society during that time, as well as their different prerogatives towards the war and its consequences. Likewise, The Odyssey by Homer uses the main female character, Penelope, to convey the role of women and their opinions towards the social changes from the war. Both texts, collectively, use dialogue to develop hopeful and hopeless ideas within the women of ancient Greece.
Euripides’ The Trojan Women tells the story of three women, Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra, who struggle with their lives after the murders of their husbands …show more content…

Upon being left by her husband during a decade-long journey, Penelope’s depressed character, like Hecuba’s character, accentuates the misery of women during that time. Once stripped of the only source of power and happiness they had—men in society—women were deemed miserable, useless, and awful in society. Penelope spent years waiting for Odysseus, and the audience watches as a beautiful, popular woman, weeps over her missing husband and lives a long, melancholy life. Penelope grows impatient and stagnantly miserable; she begins to wish for death, for life was not worth living without her husband in her life. She begs, “How I wish chaste Artemis would give me a death so soft and now I would not go on in my heart, grieving all my life and longing for love of a husband excellent in every virtue.”(Homer. 202-204) Not only was Penelope giving up on life with the absence of Odysseus, her cries and longing for death express her powerlessness and uselessness in society. Without a loving husband in her life, she was nothing but a grieving, unhappy Greek woman who was capable of nothing but weeping. Her strength is nonexistent and she is literally unable to carry on without her husband. The Odyssey, like The Trojan Women, successfully illustrates the life of a Greek woman in ancient times. Both prose show the different ways women were complacent in society; women willingly accepted this

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