All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
Isak Dinesen (quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)
Introduction
If tragedy is a mimēsis of action, as Aristotle says (Poet. 1449b24), then Trojan Women is a mimēsis of reaction. Critics are habitually quick to point out that very little happens in this play without a formal messenger speech. Francis Dunn provides the most sophisticated variation of this view by demonstrating that Trojan Women is uniquely a play in reverse, insofar as none of the typical closural gestures of the Euripidean epilogue are present in the ending but many are present in the beginning (the deus ex machina, for example).Footnote 1 The story is over before it has even begun; its mythic aftermath has been settled in the prologue as well (73–94). As a result: ‘All that remains to be told, all that gives suspense to the drama, is how the women will react to their situation.’Footnote 2
The situation of these women is suffering. Their families are already torn apart, their city already sacked. The play unfolds a series of further disasters ascending in horror which, as Talthybius reminds Andromache, the Trojan women can ‘in no way’ (οὐδαμῆι, 729) prevent. Although there are moments when they can directly alleviate their future situation, these moments ironically serve to enforce their powerlessness.Footnote 3 For instance, Andromache can secure burial for Astyanax, but only by submitting to her Greek masters (735–9); Hecuba can perform Astyanax's funeral, but only after it has been sanctioned by Talthybius and only if it is performed in haste (1149). They cannot, in any case, prevent the child's death; nor can they take revenge or find salvation as in Euripides’ other Trojan plays, Hecuba and Andromache. Regarding her incapacity for action, Hecuba is right to describe herself ‘as a drone’ (ὡς κηφήν, 192), and to pair the classic tragic dilemma, ‘What shall I do?’ (τί … δράσω; 792–3; cf. e.g. Aesch. Cho. 899) with the inverse question, ‘What might I suffer?’ (τί πάθω; 792). Yet it is precisely this passivity which constitutes the women's activity as responders to tragic suffering. From the very start of the play, the women are obsessed with working out exactly how they should respond (106–11, 153–4, 197–8).
All tragedies invariably dramatise a process of reaction without action through the chorus, a group of internal spectators which is generally, as Taplin remarks, ‘emotionally very involved, yet all but helpless to do anything about it’ and which generally diverts its ‘frustrated urge to action into lyric expression, into singing of associations – religious, mythical, ethical – and of ideas arising from their helpless emotion’.Footnote 4 Emotional involvement but helplessness to act, of course, also reflects the position of the audience, who respond to the play emotionally but are unable to affect its outcome. Yet all of the women in Euripides’ play are ‘choral’ in this regard. At the same time, the female protagonists and chorus, unlike most choruses, respond to suffering which is their own. This forms the basis of tragedy's distinctively powerful empathic force, whereby the suffering of the characters becomes invariably transfused with the hypothetical – or, in the notorious case of Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus as reported by Herodotus (6.21), all too real (οἰκῄα κακά) – suffering of the audience.Footnote 5 Trojan Women, a play which many have seen as blurring the boundaries between Greek and Trojan/Barbarian in the vein of Andromache's notorious juxtaposition (ὦ βάρβαρ’ ἐξευρόντες Ἕλληνες κακά, 764), may have come awfully close to dramatising the οἰκῄα κακά of the Athenian audience in 415 BC – the Athenian audience who had recently been responsible for sacking Melos, murdering its adult male population and enslaving its women and children, and who would soon be responsible for launching the disastrous Sicilian expedition.Footnote 6 The crucial point to take home from these observations is that in Trojan Women, a play which almost exclusively, thus exceptionally, consists of characters responding to tragic suffering, all the women play, in a sense, chorus as well as protagonist as well as audience (as well as author, as we will see). Trojan Women self-consciously stages the dynamics of tragedy's effect on all fronts.
This article will take one particular philosophical approach to exploring those dynamics. This approach was for some time out of favour, with scholars focusing primarily on the socio-political effect of tragedy in its historical moment,Footnote 7 rather than considering its philosophical effect, either in the Aristotelian tradition of locating it in the emotions and/or intellect or in the German idealist tradition of seeking it in metaphysics.Footnote 8 This move has been characterised, as Leonard summarises, ‘by resistance not just to individual figures in this philosophical tradition but to the whole modern philosophical engagement with tragedy as such’.Footnote 9 Recent Anglophone scholarship, however, has reconsidered the relationship between philosophical theory and dramatic practice, without instrumentalising tragedy for the sake of philosophy or vice versa.Footnote 10 Turning back predominantly towards the legacy of the German idealists, scholars have both shown the importance of tragedy to post-Kantian philosophy and thus the shaping of modernity, and demonstrated how modern readings of tragedy cannot escape using the critical vocabulary entrenched by these philosophical readings. However, this approach has not always illustrated how the philosophy of ‘the tragic’ and an understanding of its critical embeddedness might pragmatically inform close analysis of the tragedies themselves, or how a close analysis of tragic texts might help us to understand philosophical ones better.Footnote 11 I intend to elaborate Billings’ programmatic claim about (idealist) theorising: ‘Even if the particulars of its sense would not be upheld today, the possibilities of meaning it discovers can be a guide for us.’Footnote 12
It is Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BT) which may best help us to discover such possibilities in Euripides’ Trojan Women, and Euripides’ Trojan Women which may do the same for Nietzsche's BT. This may seem an odd move at first: not only is Nietzsche actively antagonistic towards Euripides, the poet held to be responsible for tragedy's death by ‘suicide’ (BT 54), but he does not even mention Trojan Women at all (BT is, of course, infamously light on philological criticism, hardly discussing any plays at all or only doing so in scant detail). Yet any apparent tension in this regard may prove all the more productive, since we will not be constrained by what Nietzsche himself says about the play and so can let the theory do the talking. For, in spite of what he says about Euripides (notwithstanding that the philosopher's complex relationship to the poet will be re-evaluated in due course), the eponymous women do seem to encapsulate the nub of Nietzsche's theory of response to tragic suffering more systematically than that of any other philosopher, and they do so more comprehensively than in any other Euripidean play.Footnote 13 Let me be clear from the start that what I am doing will inevitably fail to do full justice to Nietzsche's extraordinarily rich account, which above all seeks to explain the metaphysical power of tragedy as it is experienced externally by the spectators and not internally by the characters – though that is complicated by what Nietzsche says about Hamlet (BT 40) and the Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus (BT 47–8), both characters who themselves are said to be experiencing Dionysiac nausea and redemption respectively.Footnote 14 It is also complicated by what Nietzsche says about the chorus, with whom the audience is said to identify so that ‘the whole is just one sublime chorus’ (BT 42).
Nevertheless, since Trojan Women is a play which does internally and self-consciously explore how to respond to tragedy, the women may at the same time be characters who trigger the audience to respond to suffering as they are spectator figures or chorus members who model various responses to suffering themselves. Nietzsche may be right, in this regard at least, to say that Euripides ‘brought the spectator on to the stage’ (BT 55). The uber-metatheatrical Hamlet may indeed be an apt model for this dual position – and it is Shakespeare's Hamlet, after all, who cites Hecuba as the paradigm for theatrical transfusion: ‘What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, | That he should weep for her?’ (Hamlet 2.2.494–5).
That said, BT and Trojan Women can be read in fruitful dialogue, since both works at heart confront the degré zéro of human suffering and the resulting threat of nihilism. This is epitomised by the ‘wisdom’ propounded by Silenus and Andromache in the two respective texts that it is better to die than to live and suffer (BT 23; Tro. 636–7); and yet Nietzsche and some of Euripides’ women attempt to affirm life even in such circumstances. Nietzschean categories, which will also turn out to help us become more critically self-aware since many scholarly roads of this play lead to Nietzsche,Footnote 15 will help us explain above all how Hecuba and the chorus of Trojan women respond to their suffering by attempting to exhibit what might be called a ‘pessimism of strength’ (BT, ‘Self-Criticism’ 4), and then by attempting to aestheticise themselves (BT 33, 113, ‘Self-Criticism’ 8). In short, these women construct a theory of response to tragic suffering on proto-Nietzschean terms, which in essence sees tragic art, with its unique synthesis of the forces of the Apolline and Dionysiac, as the ultimate prophylactic against that threat of nihilism.
However, as we will see, Trojan Women shows how no theory of response, even one as powerful and fitting as Nietzsche's, could be entirely adequate to the nature of suffering.Footnote 16 The play thus exposes some of the theoretical cracks in Nietzsche's work upon which no shortage of critics since Wilamowitz have jumped.Footnote 17 Yet the buck does not stop there. We will see in the final section how the resistance of Trojan Women to Nietzschean theory can illuminate an auto-deconstructive reading of Nietzsche's BT, which sees it as extraordinarily self-aware of its own theoretical fissures and failures.Footnote 18 And so far from Nietzsche being Euripides’ most hostile critic (and being rightly criticised for that), he and Euripides will in fact end up on the same page. More broadly speaking, this dialogic reading of Euripides and Nietzsche will have some big implications for thinking through a key critical issue of scholarship on tragedy in particular and classics in general: namely, how we might come to terms with the seemingly irreducible tension between tragedy and ‘the tragic’, historicism and universalism.
Nietzsche to Euripides
The prologue of Trojan Women lays the foundations for a particularly Nietzschean theorising of response. It presents from the very beginning a situation of unimaginably grim suffering, ‘the terrors of individual existence’ (BT 80), in the face of which, Nietzsche argues, life can nevertheless be affirmed. In exposition, Poseidon telescopes outwards to provide a view of Troy (8–9):
The language of ‘desolation’ (ἐρημία, 15, 26, 97), coupled with the sheer variety of synonyms of the verb ‘to destroy’ (ὄλωλε, 9; συνεξεῖλον, 24; διώλεσεν, 46; κατῃθαλωμένην, 60; ἔπερσάν, 72; ἐκπορθεῖ, 95), pervades the prologue and indeed the play as a whole.Footnote 19 It is not just the Trojans, whose situation is embodied by their despondent former queen lying prostrate on the stage (36–8),Footnote 20 who are subject to ruin, but also the Greeks, whose victory will turn Pyrrhic as Athena and Poseidon conspire to inflict a storm upon their fleet that will ensure a ‘bitter return’ (νόστον πικρόν, 66), a ‘return that is no return’ (δύσνοστον νόστον, 75). There is even a hint of parallelism between the Trojans and the Greeks as the projected burning of the Greek fleet might recall the burning of Troy, with the same verb being used at the end of the play as well (πιμπράναι, 81; πιμπρᾶσι, 1279). In short, everyone in this play is enveloped in a ‘complex web of destruction’.Footnote 21
Nietzsche's claim to have found ‘the concept of “the tragic”’, as he retrospectively wrote, rests upon the following assertion of tragedy's effect:
Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types … (Twilight of the Idols 121)
The prologue of Trojan Women is a grisly exposition of life's ‘strangest and sternest problems’. Can even the staged collapse of a civilisation and ruin of its noblest family, as well as the portended downfall of the Greek victors – the ‘highest types’ – nevertheless inspire such a response as life-affirmation?
This is the question that Hecuba and the chorus face head-on. For they, above all the other characters in this play, embody the kernel of the Nietzschean theory – and, as we will see, its limitations – by their (near-)persistence and especially by their (dubious) attempts to aestheticise their suffering. They are, in fact, privileged characters in this play since they are present in every scene, while Hecuba's constant onstage presence marks her as unique among tragic hero(in)es alongside Prometheus. In the destruction of the hero lies one of Nietzsche's central arguments:
We take pleasure in the negation of the hero, the supreme appearance of the Will, because he is, after all, mere appearance, and because the eternal life of the Will is not affected by his annihilation. (BT 80)
Hecuba, negated with alpha privatives as an ‘old woman without city without children’ (γραῦς ἄπολις ἄτεκνος, 1186), just like her husband Priam ‘without burial without friend without knowledge of my ruin’ (ἄταφος ἄφιλος | ἄτας ἐμᾶς ᾄστος, 1313–14), acknowledges her total destruction in one particularly devastating tricolon (468):
And yet she endures. That pithy acknowledgment of total suffering rather seems to be an affirmative gesture, a cry of defiance and not despair, especially as the future tense seems to indicate a resolve to carry on suffering. Indeed, following yet more suffering after she finds out about her grandson's murder and that some newer misery is about to be inflicted upon Troy (1251–9), Hecuba claims to have reached the ‘final end point of all my misery’ (τοῦτο δὴ τὸ λοίσθιον | καὶ τέρμα πάντων τῶν ἐμῶν ἤδη κακῶν, 1272–3), something which might indicate that she has transcended it – τέρμα means ‘turning point’ as well as ‘end point’, after all. Programmatically, she picks herself up off the ground at the start of the play (98–104):
She opens with defiant imperatives (ἄνα, ἐπάειρε, ἄνσχου, πλεῖ, μηδὲ προσίστη) which subsume the ‘turmoil of appearances’ (BT 85) marked by the language of fortune (δαίμονος, δαίμονα, τύχαισιν) and change (μεταβαλλομένου, κῦμα). Although Hecuba fluctuates in her responses to suffering throughout Trojan Women, spending the play wavering between standing upright and collapsing on the ground, between symbolically staying afloat (102–4) and resigning to the waves (688–96), she arguably ends the play as she began, on the same note of defiance: onwards she goes (φέρετ’… ἴτ’, 1329).
Crucially, she endures alongside the chorus, who now stand for her children’ (146, 159, 182) and give the play its title. Hecuba has ‘run into the same misfortune’ (ἐς ταὐτὸν ἥκεις συμφορᾶς, 684) as those women, who also face an uncertain future as ‘slaves in a Dorian land’ (δοῦλαι Δωρίδος χθονός, 233–4) and also wonder where exactly they will be taken (161–2, 184–5, 187–9, 293–4). Trojan Women in fact undermines Nietzsche's claim that the chorus in Euripidean drama was no longer the ‘womb’ of tragedy (BT 44) and reduced to its function in New Comedy as an intermezzo ‘to be dispensed with’ (BT 70).Footnote 22 For Nietzsche, tragedy requires not just the destruction of the Apolline hero but also, more importantly, the survival of the Dionysiac chorus, ‘whose life goes on ineradicably behind and beyond all civilization’ (BT 39).Footnote 23 By the end of the play, Hecuba becomes almost fully choral, almost embodying ‘the metaphysical solace that eternal life flows on beneath the turmoil of appearances’ (BT 85).
It is the chorus with whom Hecuba ‘suffers’ (πάσχομεν, 1290) and is ‘taken, borne’ (ἀγόμεθα φερόμεθ’, 1310); it is Hecuba with whom the chorus sink on their knees in a visceral display of solidarity borne in pain (1305–9). The exodos is a mirror image of Hecuba's opening monody and the parodos with herand the chorus ‘wailing aloud’ (αἰάζωμεν, 145). In the play's final verses, Hecuba's cries (ἰὼ ἰώ) and imperatives (φέρετ’, ἴτ’) are matched by those of the chorus (ἰώ, πρόφερε) (1327–32):
Rather than exhibiting Schopenhauerian or Buddhistic negation of life, all the Trojan women are willing to confront existence despite (ὅμως/δέ) their suffering. They seek to live on even in the absence of hope, something that is cruelly stripped away every time it is expressed in this play.Footnote 24 Might we call this, in Nietzschean terms, the demonstration of a collective ‘pessimism of strength’ (BT, ‘Self-Criticism’ 4)?Footnote 25
Not quite. Hecuba's life-affirming stance at the end of the play is oxymoronic as she bids her aged foot to hurry on towards the Greek ships with just enough resolve (ὦ γεραιὲ πούς, ἐπίσπευσον μόλις, 1275), but then immediately attempts to fling herself onto Astyanax's pyre and to encourage the chorus to do the same (1282–3). Given that she is kept alive against her will, the survival of this ‘wretch’ (δύστηνε, 1284) seems cruel rather than courageous. The fact that Talthybius bids Odysseus’ servants first to lead Hecuba away and then to not refrain implies that their initial response was, humanely perhaps, to refrain (ἀλλ’ ἄγετε, μὴ φείδεσθ’, 1285). These men seem to share implicitly Talthybius’ earlier thought that suicide constitutes an act ‘beneficial to the women’ (ταῖσδε πρόσφορον, 304), just as Polyxena's death euphemistically meant her ‘release from troubles’ (ἀπηλλάχθαι πόνων, 270). If the women's survival is at all defiant, then, it is a brutally thin sort of defiance – a particularly Euripidean sentiment, to be sure.Footnote 26 The play's parting image – an old woman's trembling limbs that hardly support her step and the chorus of women's feet that seem to resist the command to bring them forward – is far more a marker of fragility than of strength.
Trojan Women, one of a select number of plays George Steiner tendentiously brands ‘tragedy pure and simple’,Footnote 27 treads awfully close to the absolute nihilism of Silenus’ dictum – the nihilism which tragedy is meant to redeem or transfigure according to Nietzsche (at least on a straightforward reading; see below). This is particularly clear if we compare Hecuba's suffering to that of Nietzsche's own paradigmatic tragic heroes, Oedipus and Prometheus (BT 46–51, 84). Unlike the former, who had the capacity to follow Jocasta and commit suicide but chose not to do so, ultimately achieving ‘infinite transfiguration’ in Oedipus at Colonus as Nietzsche argues (BT 47), Hecuba has no other choice but to continue to live as a slave, while her transfiguration, alluded to by Cassandra, will be into a dog and not a daemon (Tro. 427–30; cf. Hec. 1258–74). Unlike the latter, who committed crimes for which he is being punished in Prometheus Bound in the name of ‘eternal justice’ as Nietzsche claims (BT 49), Hecuba has done nothing wrong (if anything, she has behaved quite well).Footnote 28 Despite being the last play of a uniquely connected Euripidean ‘Trojan Trilogy’,Footnote 29 Trojan Women is hardly recuperative, in contradistinction to the probably constructive conclusion of Aeschylus’ Prometheia trilogy, for example.Footnote 30 The impending punishment of the Greeks, possibly hinted at in the play's last words referring to their ships (ἐπὶ πλάτας Ἀχαιῶν, 1332), by no means justifies or recompenses the sufferings we have just witnessed.Footnote 31 There is no epilogic deus ex machina to ‘reassure the public about the future of [the] heroes’ (BT 63), nor any other (superficially) comforting closural gesture for that matter.Footnote 32 These captive women – and who knows what happened to the rest who were not assigned to the leaders of the army (32–5)? – still have no idea where exactly they are being taken. Yet we know that, wherever they are heading, they will be subject to the same violently destructive storm as their Greek masters.
The play ends near to where it began: the city burning (8, 60, 145; 1260–3, 1295–1301, 1318), the image of its king sacrilegiously slaughtered (16–17, 1312–16), its existence negated in language (οὐκέτι Τροία | τάδε, 99–100; οὐδ’ ἔτ’ ἔστι Τροία, 1292; οὐδ’ ἔτ’ ἔστιν | ἁ τάλαινα Τροία, 1323–4). The main difference is the degree of urgency and despair as Troy's fall is vividly (re-)enacted. Amidst Hecuba's cries of pain redoubled by the chorus (ἄλγος ἄλγος βοᾷς, 1310), the sound of Troy's falling towers (Εκ. ἐμάθετ’, ἐκλύετε; Χο. περγάμων <γε> κτύπον, 1325) and the trumpet's blast (σάλπιγγος ἠχώ, 1267), it is difficult to hear any of tragedy's alleged exultation, expressed through music and ventriloquised by Nietzsche, ‘“We believe in eternal life”’ (BT 80). Uniquely in tragedy, this chorus will not survive ‘ineradicably’ (BT 39).
The most significant responses to tragic suffering in Trojan Women are not merely the attempts of Hecuba and the chorus to persist but especially their attempts to aestheticise themselves in doing so. The sufferers in this play are hyper-aware of their own ‘songs of woe’ (δακρύων ἐλέγους, 119), offering different explanations for the psychological and socio-political effect of those songs, which range from the pleasurable (608–9) to the didactic (684–5) to the empowering (792–5). More pressing in this play, however, is their songs’ aesthetic-cum-metaphysical effect, which is to say the way in which suffering is transfigured into something that has existential meaning and value as a work of art. This is also the central concern of BT. Following a discussion of Hamlet and his understanding of ‘the wisdom of the wood god Silenus’, Nietzsche writes that it is art which ‘approaches as a saving sorceress with the power to heal’ and which ‘alone can re-direct those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live’ (BT 40).
For Nietzsche, there are two artistic forces that come together to constitute tragedy's unique form and explain its unique effect: the Apolline and the Dionysiac (esp. BT 14–28).Footnote 33 What is important for my purposes is that the former is epitomised by Homeric epic and the hero, identified with language and beauty, and said to produce feelings of serenity and pleasure; while the latter is epitomised by tragedy and the chorus (insofar as tragedy is held to show the Dionysiac harmonising with but ultimately subsuming the Apolline), identified with music and primordial essence, and said to produce feelings of horror and rapture. If pure Apolline art is seductive but merely illusory while pure Dionysiac art is true but uncompromisingly nihilistic, tragedy, according to Nietzsche, initially services the former for the latter. In a telling image describing the relationship between the two, Nietzsche inversely compares the effect of the Apolline in tragedy, exemplified by the ‘definiteness and clarity’ of the language of masked Sophoclean heroes, to the quasi-salutary dark patches that appear in our eyes after we gaze into the sun:
… the necessary result of gazing into the inner, terrible depths of nature – radiant patches, as it were, to heal a gaze seared by a gruesome night. (BT 46)
But this effect is not long-lasting. Nietzsche's conception of tragedy, in the words of Silk and Stern, ‘consists of a marriage between the two principles from which the Dionysiac must in the end emerge as the dominant partner’.Footnote 34 In a rich passage describing the ‘pure and unalloyed effect of a true musical tragedy’ in an imaginary spectator, Nietzsche argues that the Apolline is ultimately disavowed. It is worth quoting at length:
He sees the transfigured world of the stage, and yet he negates it. He sees before him the tragic hero with all the clarity and beauty of the epic, and yet he takes delight in his destruction. He comprehends events on the stage to their innermost core, and yet he gladly flees into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero to be justified, and yet he feels even more elated when these actions destroy the man who performs them. He shivers in horror at the sufferings which will befall the hero, and yet they give him a premonition of a higher, far more overwhelming delight. He sees more and deeper than ever before, and yet he wishes he were blind. Where are we to find the origin of this wondrous self-division, this breaking and bending back of the point of Apollo, if not in Dionysiac magic which, while apparently stimulating the Apolline impulses to their highest pitch, is nevertheless able to force the exuberance of Apolline energy into its service? The tragic myth can only be understood as the transformation of Dionysiac wisdom into images by means of Apolline artistry; it leads the world of appearances to its limits where it negates itself and seeks to flee back into the womb of the one, true reality … (BT 104–5)
The dialectic between the Apolline and the Dionysiac underpins BT. It is a dialectic that seems particularly pertinent to Trojan Women, a play that critics have often read using similar language. On the one hand, there is the quasi-Apolline argument: ‘Trojan Women testifies to the power of logos to help human beings endure the unendurable.’Footnote 35 On the other, there is the quasi-Dionysiac contention: ‘Amidst the smoking rubble of Troy, the play refuses the easy consolation of idealization.’Footnote 36 Barbara Goff notes how Trojan Women has frequently polarised the responses of critics along these battle lines of ‘nihilistic despair and a determination to retrieve from the ruins some spark of consolation’.Footnote 37 This dichotomy merits further exploration through Nietzschean lenses – lenses through which, in a sense, modern critics have always been seeing this play. It is the twists and turns between the Apolline and Dionysiac positions within Trojan Women, as well as within Nietzsche's own writing, to which we will now turn.
Hecuba and the chorus embody – and at the same time, as we will see, disavow – what many commentators have regarded as the core sentence of BT,Footnote 38 an extraordinarily loaded claim repeated, or rather almost but not quite repeated (a point to which I will return), three times in the book (BT 33; cf. 113, ‘Self-Criticism’ 8):
– for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified –
At certain moments they implicitly or explicitly aestheticise suffering in order to justify ‘existence and the world’ (‘das Dasein und die Welt’). They seem to acknowledge Nietzsche's claim that ‘our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art’ but they seem to bely the subsequent claim that ‘our awareness of our significance in this respect hardly differs from the awareness which painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas’ (BT 33). Unlike painted soldiers on a canvas, they are at times hyper-aware of their status as aesthetic phenomena. They are, we might say, the uncanny embodiment of the ‘uncanny image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes around and look at itself … simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator’ (BT 33). As such, they are in prime position to test tragedy's aesthetic, hence metaphysical, salve.Footnote 39
There is an extraordinary stasimon at the heart of the play in which the chorus retells the story of the wooden horse (511–67). No commentator fails to notice how this ‘ode of mourning’ begins in the manner of an epic proem (or Homeric Hymn) that is unparalleled in tragedy (511–14):Footnote 40
These self-consciously ‘new hymnic strains’ of this tearful Muse are, in Nietzschean terms, the Dionysiac notes of tragedy (and dithyramb) played in the Apolline key of epic.Footnote 41 The chorus describe the events within Troy on the fateful night of its sacking, including old men and young women outside and rejoicing in song (528–9), music being played (544–5), and girls dancing and singing joyfully (545–7). This is all in grim contrast to the cries of murder which end up running through the city (555–6). The theme of this song is not Greek ‘victory’ (στέφανον, 565) but, its last word, Trojan ‘grief’ (πένθος, 567). Unlike the omniscient Homeric narrator who cooperates with the Muse at the beginning of the poem, the chorus, participants in the events themselves, compete with the Muse (and Homer) in the middle of the play: ‘For now I shall sing a song to Troy’ (νῦν γὰρ μέλος ἐς Τροίαν ἰαχήσω, 515). This lyric song comprises epic features such as the invocation of the Muse, but stripped of epic content such as the deeds of men (κλέα ἀνδρῶν, Il. 9.189). It thereby represents one version of Nietzsche's conception of tragedy's synthesis of the Apolline and Dionysiac: ‘Thus, drama is the Apolline embodiment of Dionysiac insights and effects, and is thereby separated by a vast gulf from the epic’ (BT 44).
However, the Apolline is not quite subsumed by the Dionysiac, as is required for the full tragic effect in the end (esp. BT 102–6, 112–13, 115–16). For the chorus’ hybrid song fails to abandon epic's strategy of consolation, which rests upon the promise of kleos, and thus fails to imagine anything ‘beyond all the effects of Apolline art’ (BT 103). By singing of the fall of Troy, a song already canonised by Demodocus (Od. 8.499–520; it was also, of course, the subject of Iliou persis), they already are engaging in the process of epic immortalisation. In fact, the situation of these captive Trojan women actualises that of the women evoked in the simile describing Odysseus’ tearful reaction to Demodocus’ song (Od. 8.521–31). Moreover, as it is lament that guarantees kleos within epic (while challenging it, to be sure),Footnote 42 the women are effectively lamenting themselves as they ask the Muse to sing a ‘dirge’ (ᾠδὰν ἐπικήδειον, 514). Appreciating the gendered dimension of the chorus’ appropriation of epic, Dana Munteanu writes: ‘By asking the Muse for a song, the chorus, acting as a bard, assures long-lasting fame for the song's subjects. But as becomes obvious later in the play, this fame concerns the fate of enslaved women and slaughtered children, not the martial glory of men and gods.’Footnote 43
Indeed, at the end of the play it is Hecuba who most explicitly appropriates epic's capacity to bestow poetic consolation (1242–5):
It is often pointed out how this strikingly resembles Helen's metapoetic self-awareness in the Iliad (6.357–8):Footnote 44
For both Hecuba and Helen, the memorialisation in song endows the suffering with meaning – justifies it. In Gilbert Murray's quasi-Nietzschean formulation, ‘Hecuba faces That Which Is and finds somewhere, in the very intensity of Troy's affliction, a splendour which cannot die.’Footnote 45 When the situation is at its most desperate Hecuba memorialises herself as an epic hero assured of (his) all-justifying kleos, just as Cassandra had earlier memorialised Hector and Paris (394–9). Moreover, unlike other Euripidean sufferers (e.g. Ion 355–91; Bac. 1346–8), she does not here complain about the so-called ‘problem of evil’ – here how the gods could allow suffering to happen to good people such as her whose sacrifices turned out to be in vain (1240–2) – but rather transfigures her own divinely sanctioned suffering into a meaningful aesthetic object for future generations. In Nietzschean vein, she presents her plight as being ‘beyond good and evil’ (BT, ‘Self-Criticism’ 8), something that is even willed and sought out in the manner described by Nietzsche later in On the Genealogy of Morality: ‘Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering’ (120). Crucially, it is strictly Apolline consolation that offers Hecuba a powerful raison d’être – Rechtfertigung would be Nietzsche's theologically inflected wordFootnote 46 – in the startling absence of a theodicy. It is this ultimate commitment to the Apolline that helps Hecuba persist, since, to adopt Nietzsche from Twilight of the Idols, it has given her a ‘why of life’ that will help her bear ‘almost any how’ (30).
Almost. For Hecuba does not successfully solicit Apolline-cum-epic consolation. Although she has been (will be) the subject of song in the epic tradition, this song is not an epic, the Apolline art par excellence in which ‘Apollo overcomes the individual's suffering by his luminous glorification of the eternity of appearance’ and ‘beauty gains victory over the suffering inherent in life’ (BT 80). As Adrian Poole perceives, ‘There is not a grain of “splendour” in this Fall of Troy.’Footnote 47 The urgency and desperation of Hecuba's counter-factual claim for poetic memorialisation stands ultimately in contrast to Helen's calm foresight in the Iliad.Footnote 48 There is no authoritative Muse, invoked and responsive in the Iliad (1.1, 9), to secure Hecuba's kleos. There are no κλέα ἀνδρῶν (Il. 9.189) – no living Trojan men but only unheroic Greek men – to relate in the first place in this play. It is telling how reluctantly Talthybius conveys the news of the Trojan women's sufferings in this play: unlike many a Homeric hero, he does not gloat over his enemies in their plight, but in fact even ends up sympathising with them (1130–1, 1147–55).Footnote 49
Here, epic consolation through kleos is dismantled in its very exposition – just as it had been earlier in the play, it is worth adding, when Cassandra memorialised the vanquished Trojans by resurrecting the language of epic glory (e.g. τὸ κάλλιστον κλέος, 386; καλῶς ὀλέσθαι, 402) which she herself had punctured in rebuking the vanquished Greeks, or similarly when Andromache complained that it is her very ‘reputation’ (εὐδοξία, 643) which has ‘destroyed’ her (ἀπώλεσεν, 658).Footnote 50 Above all, Hecuba anticipates the gravest ethical objection to Nietzsche's notion of aesthetic justification, namely the possibility of aesthetically justifying the infliction as much as the endurance of suffering, of condoning individuals who may, like Shakespeare's hyper-vengeful Titus Andronicus, ‘Plot some device of further miseries | To make us wondered at in time to come’ (Titus Andronicus 3.1.134–5).Footnote 51 Hecuba herself in fact does go on to plot further miseries, desperately attempting suicide in the name of heroic beauty (ὡς κάλλιστα, 1282) later in this play and brutally taking revenge on Polymestor in her own eponymous play (Hec. 1035–55) – and there doing so in a perversely aestheticised manner after she had bid Agamemnon and Odysseus (and the audience) to view her ‘like a painter standing back from his work’ (ὡς γραφεύς τ’ ἀποσταθείς, Hec. 807). To seek distinction out of extinction is naive.
Hecuba does, however, come close to disavowing any sentimentalised version of aesthetic justification, almost getting to the point where ‘Apolline deception is revealed for what it is: a persistent veiling’ (BT 103). As she laments over Astyanax's corpse, she challenges the Apolline-cum-epic ideals of dying pro patria and attaining marriage, manhood and kingship (1168–70):
The conditional tagged on to the end of this counter-factual catalogue slashes the intrinsic worth of those things. Ironically, it is Astyanax's position as the ‘son of the best father’ (ἀρίστου παῖδα πατρός, 723) – words which sardonically resurrect Cassandra's earlier praise of Hector ‘reputed to be the best man’ (δόξας ἀνὴρ ἄριστος, 395) – that actually supports the Greeks’ justification for murdering him. Patrimony here is destructive rather than constructive, something Andromache had recognised by noting that it is Hector's very ‘nobility of birth’ (εὐγένεια) that will kill his son (742) and turn him into an obscene ‘sacrificial victim’ (σφάγιον, 747). Besides, this supposed victim, an innocent boy who will never live up to his name as ‘Lord of the City’ (Il. 6.402–3; cf. 748), is hardly one of life's ‘highest types’ whose ‘sacrifice’ is allegedly required for life's affirmation (Twilight of the Idols 121). More resentfully, Hecuba asks (1188–91):
How could something as horrific as the murder of a harmless child be transfigured into something worthy of memory? What would poetic memory even do for Astyanax apart from endowing him with an epitaph that is ‘shameful for Greece’? It is an imaginary epitaph, in any case, since Astyanax is being consigned to an unmarked grave, with the notion of the Greeks ‘fearing’ (δείσαντες) revenge absurd since there is evidently no possibility of that with Hector and the Trojan men already dead (1159–66). The idea of the lapidary heroisation of a fearsome warrior,Footnote 52 when Astyanax is a mere ‘infant’ (βρέφος, 1165), is perverse. Above all, the brute fact of having Astyanax's corpse onstage makes one shudder at the prospect of its aestheticisation.Footnote 53 It is Hecuba, and not a messenger indirectly reporting what he saw offstage, who does not ‘cover up the grim details’ (αἰσχρὰ μὴ στέγω, 1177) of the murder, as she directly addresses Astyanax's mangled body which lies bloodied and broken (1173–9) for us to ‘behold’ (λεύσσετε, 1119). The perversion of the burial ritual in a ‘wretched tomb’ (ἀθλίῳ τύμβῳ, 1246) – not to mention the old burying the young (1185–6), the robe intended for royal marriage placed upon the mangled corpse (1218–20), the former queen playing a poor physician (1232–3), the sense that ample funerary rites do not even matter (1247–50) – is, we might say, the ritual equivalent to the perversion of the poetic consolation.Footnote 54 In perhaps the play's most blood-curling image (1176–7), ‘slaughter’ (φόνος) is ‘laughing’ (ἐκγελᾷ) out of Astyanax's ‘shattered bones’ (ὀστέων ῥαγέντων). But there should be no laughter in slaughter – except for the sadistic Silenus who ‘breaks out in shrill laughter’ before dispensing the nihilistic ‘wisdom’ that it is best ‘not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing’ (BT 23), or for the madwoman Cassandra whom the chorus are shocked to see ‘laughing sweetly at [her] own misfortunes’ (ὡς ἡδέως κακοῖσιν οἰκείοις γελᾷς, 406).
With Astyanax's death, we are treading awfully close to Schopenhauer's account of tragedy (something like a pure Dionysiac account) that sees in tragedy the very confirmation of nihilism against which Nietzsche's account (synthesising the Apolline and the Dionysiac) is contending: ‘the terrible side of life … the wailing and lamentation of mankind, the dominion of chance and error, the fall of the righteous, the triumph of the wicked.’Footnote 55 All of these features are paramount in the death of the ‘blameless’ (οὐδὲν αἴτιον, 765) child, marking the triumph of Odysseus the ‘enemy of justice, lawless creature’ (πολεμίῳ δίκας, παρανόμῳ δάκει, 284), and provoking the women to bewail the mutability of fortune (ἰὼ ἰώ, καίν’ ἐκ καινῶν μεταβάλλουσαι | χθονὶ συντυχίαι, 1118–19).
And yet here we are again: Hecuba characteristically doubles back on herself. Trojan Women – like its critics, we will remember, as well as Nietzsche himself – is constantly caught between propounding the profoundly nauseating effect of the Dionysiac and the superficially redemptive effect of the Apolline. As Hecuba contends (1192–3):
Hecuba ‘nevertheless’, with ἀλλ’ and ὅμως framing the line, consoles herself that at least Astyanax is buried on his father's shield – a shield, however, which failed in its function since it could ‘protect’ (σῴζουσ’, 1194) neither Hector nor his son. Abandoning her initial grief (1157), she twice personifies the shield as if it had fulfilled that function, a heroising – delusional – gesture recalling Ajax's personification of Hector's sword before his (un)heroic suicide (1194–9, 1221–5):Footnote 56
The shield here becomes an emblem of victory (καλλίνικε, μυρίων μῆτερ τροπαίων, στεφανοῦ), endowed with a sort of vitality (οὐ θανοῦσα) even as it is said to die with the corpse (θανοῦσα σὺν νεκρῶι).Footnote 57 Bearing the sweaty traces of Hector, it might even materialise that Homeric hero's ‘immortal glory’ (κλέος ἄφθιτον, Il. 9.413). Astyanax's funeral, which Hecuba also tries to remould as Astyanax's ‘worthy’ (ἄξιον) victory over Odysseus in a contest for Hector's arms, thus becomes a pseudo-epic warrior's burial on home soil accompanied by female lament (cf. 376–8; although it is no wife who will clothe Astyanax for burial of course). Hecuba ultimately resorts to the illusory power of the Apolline, ‘bent on restoring the almost shattered individual … bringing the healing balm of a blissful deception’ (BT 101). Above all, as we saw above, Hecuba takes comfort in the fact that she will at least be a song for future generations …
Hecuba and the Trojan women consistently fail to ditch Apolline aesthetics with its shallow and illusory – delusory even – comfort. This is the case even as the Dionysiac sears in the play's final moments.Footnote 58 As Troy is reduced to material rubble, language itself almost evaporates: the women's lament is interspersed with a cacophony of inarticulate noises of pain (esp. 1287–1332: αἰαῖ, ὀτοτοτοτοῖ, ἰώ, ἔ) and the city itself almost disappears by a simple enjambment and subtraction of letters (μεγαλόπολις | ἄπολις, 1291–2). The consolation of kleos is rendered hollow as Hecuba and the chorus lament how Troy's ‘famous name’ (τὸ κλεινὸν ὄνομ’, 1278; cf. τὸ κλεινὸν Ἴλιον, 25) – the epithet recalls the opening words of the entire trilogy (τὸ κλεινὸν [Ἴ]λιον, P.Oxy. 3650) – will vanish (ἀφαιρήσῃ, 1278; ἀνώνυμοι, 1319; ἀφανές, 1323). The abyss of ‘primordial unity’, as Nietzsche via Schopenhauer conceives it (BT 18), seems almost palpable. Paradoxically, however, Troy vanishes in the very same breath as its vanishing is being turned into a subject of song. That song has been (will be) part of the epic tradition; it will also become Trojan Women and its future tragic reproductions. Troy cannot vanish, as Hecuba herself had already affirmed using the same language (ἀφανεῖς, 1242) – a claim which also paradoxically undercuts Agamemnon's boast to leave Troy utterly desolated, ‘unmourned and unseen’ (ἀκήδεστοι καὶ ἄφαντοι, Il. 6.60), in the very moment when Troy's utter desolation is being mourned and staged. For Troy will persist, even in the face of its total annihilation, as long as there is language – the domain of the Apolline – to tell its story. The Dionysiac itself, here encoded in poetic language, thus turns out to be a peculiarly Apolline construct.Footnote 59 As is also, we might add, the notion of aesthetic justification in the first place.Footnote 60
Trojan Women not only shows the shortcomings of Nietzsche's polarity of the Apolline and the Dionysiac, but it also demonstrates that no symbiosis of the two can earnestly or sentimentally provide aesthetic justification of existence, ‘the existence of even the “worst of all worlds”’ (BT 115). Yet if there is any way in which it can – for in the end what else can the women do but aestheticise their suffering? – then, to invoke James Porter's reading of Nietzschean aesthetics-cum-metaphysics, Trojan Women shows how ‘desperate, and desperately thin, this justification is … But who can live in the absence of metaphysical or mythological “comforts”?’Footnote 61 It is worth noticing at this point how Nietzsche subtly qualifies the central claim – which itself is only introduced in parentheses – that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’, by slightly altering the formulation later in BT and retrospectively in the ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’. In the former, the language of seeming introduces a hesitation (‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon does existence and the world seem justified (“gerechtfertigt erscheint”)’ (113; emphasis added)), while in the latter the adjective ‘anzüglich’ (‘provocative’), which describes the claim, problematises any ‘straight’ reading (BT, ‘Self-Criticism,’ 8).Footnote 62 In the final analysis, then, for Nietzsche and Euripides alike, aestheticisation in response to suffering only reveals the thinness of the aesthetic, hence metaphysical, salve. Trojan Women dares us to think otherwise.
Euripides to Nietzsche
Porter notes in passing that it is ‘worth toying with the thought that Euripides’ reading is fatal to tragedy, not because he gets tragedy wrong, but because he has correctly analysed its contrived and shadowy suggestiveness’.Footnote 63 Let us not merely toy with it. When Nietzsche retrospectively describes BT as a ‘questionable (“fragwürdigen”) book’ in the first sentence of his ‘Self-Criticism’, he repeats the word used in an exclamation about Euripidean tragedy: ‘How questionable (“fragwürdig”) the treatment of the myths!’ (BT 59). This notion of the ‘questionable’ – far from acceptance but not quite rejection – is apt for thinking about the relationship between Nietzschean theory in BT and Euripidean practice in Trojan Women. Paradoxically, it is the very inadequacy of Hecuba's and the chorus’ (and, if there were more space to discuss it, the other women's) responses to tragic suffering that provides a hermeneutic gap that Nietzschean theory may be in the best position to fill – even if, or precisely because, that play is never mentioned by Nietzsche. Yet, as the play has shown, suffering is irreducible. If only the women knew exactly how to respond to it, they could be out of their misery. Trojan Women refuses the comfort and coherence that reductive and totalising philosophical accounts of tragic effect promise. It refuses to console.
But here's the rub. It is precisely this resistance to wholesale Nietzschean theory that can help us to understand Nietzsche's own ‘questionable’ theorising better, as the feedback loop which we have set up unfolds. As Silk and Stern admit: ‘For every reader there comes a point where [BT] ceases to be acceptable as a theoretical statement.’Footnote 64 This is something Nietzsche himself seems to be distinctly self-conscious about from the very first sentence of the book, which problematises the possibility of understanding art solely through ‘logical insight’ (BT 14). Here, as Dennis Schmidt argues, ‘the limitations of the Birth of Tragedy to enact its own truth were painfully apparent to him’,Footnote 65 especially when Nietzsche later wrote, ‘It ought to have sung, this “new soul”, and not talked!’ (BT, ‘Self-Criticism’ 6). Nietzsche's account of tragedy appears to deconstruct itself even before we need to take into account how its underlying binaries are deconstructed as we read on: the Apolline and the Dionysiac, Socrates and Nietzsche, the repudiation and resurrection of metaphysics.Footnote 66 Not to mention that he retrospectively wrote ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’: ‘How do you read a book that is condemned but not quite disowned?’Footnote 67 According to the most persuasive reading, to me at least, the style of BT performs its central claim of ‘metaphysical recidivism’.Footnote 68 As Porter writes, ‘the work's appearances mimic and challenge – through a mixture of parody, irony, implausibility, and logical circularity – the metaphysical banalities that the work superficially conveys’.Footnote 69 There is more than a hint of irony when Nietzsche recapitulates a central tenant of BT, claiming that he has now shown ‘with great clarity and definiteness how the tragic work of art of the Greeks was truly born from the spirit of music’, and then suddenly checks himself, admitting that ‘the meaning of tragic myth, as we have stated it, never became transparent and conceptually clear to the Greek poets, far less to the Greek philosophers’ (BT 81) – as if his philologically sketchy and historically dubious account of Greek tragedy, self-consciously bound to the context of nineteenth-century Germany and openly indebted to Wagnerian opera, would make any sense to the Greeks whatsoever!Footnote 70 Indeed, openly contradicting the claim above, Nietzsche later removed ‘the spirit of music’ from the original title of the work and questioned that original decision in his ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’ (BT, ‘Self-Criticism’ 3–4). This is far from being the only moment when Nietzsche, a thinker more self-conscious about the necessary confines of one's own historical context than (m)any,Footnote 71 is giving us a nudge and a wink – a Euripidean gesture, I would be tempted to say.
Without needing to get further into the nitty-gritty of Nietzschean polemic,Footnote 72 however, we can see how this reading of BT in dialogue with Trojan Women actualises one instantiation of a ‘condition of productive tension’ between philosophy and tragedy.Footnote 73 My reading of Trojan Women as a play which creates internal resistances to its own aesthetic production, aided if not enabled by applying Nietzschean categories of tragic effect to the play and exploring their limitations, thus also serves to validate a certain reading of Nietzsche's BT in which Nietzsche refutes himself (or, rather, naive readings of BT). Put differently, Trojan Women, in its resistance to Nietzschean theorising, is more Nietzschean than Nietzsche; BT, in its resistance to its own theorising, is more Euripidean than Euripides. We are thus now in a position to answer the question in my title: Nietzsche is something to Euripides, and Euripides to Nietzsche, and both of them, together, to us.
Coda
There is more at stake in all this. My agenda has not merely been to show how a philosophical theory from modernity can illuminate an ancient play's internal configuration of tragic effect, nor how a play distinctively about responding to tragic suffering can also deepen our understanding of that particular theory. More generally, I hope to have shown one way in which we can synthesise antithetical hermeneutic categories of universalism and historicism, neither of which can singularly resolve ‘the inevitable tension between tragedy's undeniable power across history and its equally evident situation within history’.Footnote 74 This tension is particularly fraught within tragedy's critical tradition, marked by thesis and antithesis of tragedy and ‘the tragic.’Footnote 75 This methodological paradox concerns all literary critics as a matter of fact: ‘This strange doubleness of literature, its simultaneous location within and irreducibility to historical context might be said to be the very condition of the literary. It both partakes of the instant and reaches for the universal, the timely and the untimely’.Footnote 76 As Tim Whitmarsh's Nietzschean vocabulary of the ‘timely’ and ‘untimely’ indicates, it is Nietzsche who provides extraordinarily sophisticated critical awareness of this paradox throughout (and embodied by) his writings, ‘the problem of science (“Wissenschaft”) itself’ (BT, ‘Self-Criticism’ 4).Footnote 77 Nietzsche's BT, Janus-faced in historicising the birth and prophesying the rebirth of tragedy, a text which self-consciously does extrapolation of ‘the tragic’ in the guise of analysis of tragedy, philosophy in the guise of philology, universalism in the guise of historicism, itself gestures towards a hermeneutic place where these categories might coalesce.Footnote 78
Through Nietzsche's BT I have tried to get away from narrow historicism – just as Nietzsche himself tried to do in his own time – by returning to the concept of ‘the tragic’, philosophy and universalism in my reading of Trojan Women; and through Euripides’ Trojan Women I have tried to illuminate a particular reading of Nietzsche's BT. To be sure, I do not mean to ditch previous historicist interpretations of Euripides’ play which have sought to understand it specifically in relation to contemporary historical events and generally in relation to contemporary ideology.Footnote 79 It is such readings, in fact, particularly those which stress the play's power to compel the original audience to forge empathic relationships with the women in the context of Melos, that simultaneously point to the play's universalising (untimely) force, and thus might best explain its eligibility for reperformance (consider, for instance, the recent Queens of Syria performed by an all-female cast of Syrian refugees). Yet what I have done is to incorporate the relatively untapped resources of modern philosophy in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding, showing how the play confronts the inexorable and transhistorical – but ultimately irreducible – process of responding to tragic suffering. The point, however, is not that philology is replaced by philosophy, as Nietzsche's tendentious ‘confession of faith’ (‘Glaubensbekenntnis’) from 1869 would have it: philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit.Footnote 80 Rather, it is that both hermeneutic modes come together – a true philology of the future.Footnote 81
