Pascale Brillet-Dubois (Université Lumière Lyon 2): Euripides’ "Trojan Women": A Tragic Parthenon

In his tragedy The Trojan Women, Euripides makes use of verbal, visual and structural allusions to the recently built Parthenon and thus draws the audience's attention to the similarities between the Trojan plot and their own situation in 415 BC, date of the first performance at the City Dionysia. By referring to the iconography of the city's emblematic sacred building and Treasury, he responds to the glorification of Athens' problematic hegemony and builds a poetic monument to its victims. His play rivals and undermines the city's architectural gesture and assertion of power while suggesting that the Trojans’ fate embodies not only that of the recently defeated Melians, but also the predictable, maybe imminent downfall of their Athenian conquerors.

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