The Human Cost of Conflict. Greek Tragedy on the Trojan War

Abstract

This paper discusses the human cost of conflict as depicted in the ancient Greek tragedies dealing with the various phases of the Trojan War. Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ tragedies do not depict battle scenes or physical injuries of combatants and other victims of the senseless violence, but instead concentrate on the collateral damage of the War suffered by the combatants and other victims. Then as now, war shatters families and tests bonds of loyalty to the extreme, with many of the victims being women and children. The tragedies present the familial collapse, resulting not only from the physical destruction of the city of Troy, but also from the damage done to the fabric of society when normative moral codes are subjugated to the needs of war. Following the order of plays in terms of chronological sequence of events depicted, rather than dates when they were performed, the paper highlights how the human suffering began from before the actual fighting started, and continues long after the fall of Troy, as the traumatic acts of revenge persist in the next generation of the combatants’ families. While most of the Trojan War tragedies concentrate either on the suffering of the Greeks or the Trojans, in Euripides’ Andromache we see that the War’s survivors on both sides continue to suffer from the War’s after effects. Through a systematic analysis of the plays’ themes the article presents a chilling picture of the human cost of the Trojan War, with the horrifying suffering caused by war, sadly remaining relevant to many victims of conflict in the present day.