Compare and contrast the use made of the Trojan War by Athenian tragic poets with its

handling by contemporary prose authors

The Trojan War is perhaps the most widely known classical event in contemporary society.
Today, we see it as a war that historically was likely to have occurred but one that, in all reality,
proceeded quite differently to how the most famous classical accounts may have portrayed it to
have.1 Even during the classical period itself, the mythical vs historical nature of the Trojan War
was a significant point of discussion and produced many diverse opinions. Through the course
of this essay I aim to highlight the different approaches taken to the portrayal of the Trojan War
by the Athenian Tragic Poets (Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides) and contemporary prose
authors like Herodotus and Thucydides, as well as philosophers such as Gorgias (well known
for his rhetorical ‘encomium’ trying to ‘repair’ Helen’s reputation) – as well as any similarities
that may emerge through a thorough analysis of their different texts.

One notable difference in the way in which the Athenian tragic poets presented the story of the
Trojan War to how contemporary prose writers handled it is that most of their plays concerning
the War are ‘continuations’ of the story, rather than ones that take place during the 10 years of
the war itself. Aeschylus and Euripides are presenting the ‘nostoi’ of the two leaders of the
Greek expedition against Troy, Agamemnon and Menelaus, whilst Sophocles’ drama focuses on
the attempts of Neoptolemus and Odysseus to bring the master archer Philoctetes back to Troy
in order to finally end the war. All three plays, especially Sophocles’, explore the themes of
morality, honour and ‘xenia’ – which were all considered exceptionally important in Greek
society at the time and were common themes addressed in both drama and poetry.

Through the course of Sophocles play, we see Neoptolemus struggle with the morality of
betraying Philoctetes as Odysseus wishes, especially considering how the two quickly strike up
a ‘xenia’ relationship in the text.2 Sophocles makes clever use of language to illustrate this,
manipulating the somewhat ambiguous meanings of “Xenos” and “Xenoi” to show how
Neoptolemus gradually comes to truly hold the older, pain-stricken man as a friend.3 This
portrayal of Neoptolemus’ struggle, betrayal and reconciliation with Philoctetes ties into a
wider, very interesting narrative of the heroes of the Trojan War from Sophocles point of view.

1
Kurt A Raaflaub, ‘Homer, The Trojan War and History’. The Classical World, Vol. 91, No.5, 1998, pp. 392-392.
2
Elizabeth Belfiore, “Xenia in Sophocles' Philoctetes.” The Classical Journal, vol. 89, no. 2, (1993), pp. 117.
Sophocles (1990). Philoctetes. Trans. By R.G. Ussher. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, pp. 41-45, 57, 63.
3
Elizabeth Belfiore, “Xenia in Sophocles' Philoctetes.” The Classical Journal, vol. 89, no. 2, (1993), pp. 117-119.
Somewhat seen in his other play focusing on a Trojan War hero, the tragedy ‘Ajax’, in
Philoctetes Sophocles does not hesitate to present the Greek heroes as having questionable
moral values and placing victory above what is truly right – repeatedly referring to Odysseus as
of “base repute”, being part of an army whose first thought is of violence, showing him having
no qualms about leaving a man to die alone, and even implying that he would turn to “outright
villainy” if the outcome of such action would benefit himself and the Greek army. 4

Interestingly, this presentation of the Greeks as having questionable moral justifications for their
actions during the war (and even for starting the war in the first place) is one that is not widely
seen – especially in the most famous Trojan War account, Homer’s epic poem ‘The Iliad’.
Aeschylus also has characters in ‘Agamemnon’ who directly serve to question the morality of
the war and the actions of their leaders, though to a lesser extent to that seen in Sophocles as
later in the play the chorus of Mycenae citizens state that despite the cost, the war was worth it.5
Euripides ‘Helen’ doesn’t really explore the morality/justification of any of the individual
Greeks involved in the war (Menelaus is the only one who actually features in the drama),
focusing more strongly on the differing morals of the Egyptian characters Helen has to deal with
through the course of the play. This, as is noted by Joseph Roisman, reflects a wider trend
across poetry and drama to mostly marginalize the question of the morality of the Trojan War
and whether immoral actions can ever be retroactively justified.6

Contrastingly, contemporary prose authors like Herodotus and Thucydides focus far less on the
actions and lives of individual figures from the war, instead looking at the different elements of
the Trojan War from a historiographical perspective. Thucydides does not focus much on the
Trojan War in his text, using it mostly to serve as a point of progress in his story of Greece’s
growing naval power and to argue that the Peloponnesian War was in fact greater in magnitude
than the Trojan War. Early on in Book One, he argues that the numbers Homer provides for the
size of the Argive fleet “were probably exaggerated” and uses average fleet sizes at the time to
show that, considering Agamemnon was said to have gathered the whole of Hellas together, the
numbers provided were relatively few.7 This militaristic, rationalist approach – even to the point

4
Sophocles (1990). Philoctetes. Trans. By R.G. Ussher. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, pp.51, 61.
5 Aeschylus (1991). Plays: Two: Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides. Trans. By Frederic Raphael
and Kenneth McLeish. London: Methuen Drama, pp.25.
6 Joseph Roisman, ‘Greek Perspectives pm the Justness and Merits of the Trojan War’. College Literature, Vol. 35,
No. 4, 2008. Pp. 98, 100.
7 Thucydides (1972) History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. By Rex Warner. London: Penguin Books, pp.41.
of going against multiple other accounts on the basis of military rationalism - to the more
‘mythical’ Trojan War story is reflected across Thucydides work, such as in Book 1, Chapter 11
where he seems to declare that the Greeks built themselves a defence work at the start of the ten
year campaign, rather than in the final year or so as most other accounts have described. 8

Herodotus could also be said to present a rationalistic historical description of events of the
Trojan War, though it should be noted that at no point does he separate the more distant
‘mythical’ time of the Trojan War fully from the contemporary events he is describing – rather
he can be seen to repeatedly be “historicizing myth”.9 As Susanne Said discusses in
Baragwanath and De Bakker’s ‘Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus’, he repeatedly uses the
story of the Trojan War as a parallel to try and increase the reader’s understanding of the events
of the Persian Wars and Greek vs Barbarian conflicts more generally. Baragwanath has
previously noted multiple examples of Herodotus using the Trojan War as ‘exemplary plupast’,
highlighting its continuing relevance to the present story – such as when Protesilaus exacts
‘revenge’ on Artayktes at the end of Book 9, something that Herodotus even has Artayktes
himself recognise, illustrating how Herodotus not only uses the past to deepen the
understanding of the present himself generally (through his technique of ring-composition), he
also regularly presents his historical actors of doing so themselves, especially when it comes to
the Trojan War10. This is something not seen in the texts of the tragic poets or most other

8
Edwin Dolin, ‘Thucydides on the Trojan War: A critique of the Text of 1.11.1’. Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology, Vol.87, 1983, pp. 119, 122.
Thucydides (1972) History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. By Rex Warner. London: Penguin Books, pp.42.
9 Suzanne Said, (2012). ‘Herodotus and the Myth of the Trojan War’ in Baragwanath, Emily and de Bakker, Mathieu.
(ed.) Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 88-89.
Irene De Jong, (2012). ‘The Helen Logos and Herodotus’ Fingerprint’ in Baragwanath, Emily and de Bakker,
Mathieu. (ed.) Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 127-128.
10 Emily Baragwanath, (2012). ‘The Mythic Plupast in Herodotus’, in Grethlein, Jonas and Krebs, Christopher B. (ed)
Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 37-38.
Deborah Boedeker, (2012). ‘Speaker’s Past and plupast: Herodotus in the light of elegy and lyric’ in Grethlein, Jonas
and Krebs, Christopher B. (ed) Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to
Appian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21.
Carolyn Dewald, (1997). ‘Wanton kings, Pickled Heroes, and Gnomic Founding Fathers: Strategies of meaning at the
end of Herodotus’ Histories’ in D.H Roberts, F.M Dunn and D. Fowler (eds.) Classical Closure: Reading the End in
Greek and Latin Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp. 66-67.
contemporary prose literature, an illustration of how key the story of the Trojan War had
become to the collective identities and societal commemorations not just of the Greeks, but of
the Persians and other ‘barbarian’ societies as well.11

He does also, in a similar manner to Thucydides, critique the historical accuracy of Homer’s
account when discussing the story of Helen – providing multiple reasons as to why he believes
that his account is more reliable (e.g. eyewitness accounts, the Trojans refusal to give up Helen
making no sense) and uses language cleverly to emphasise the authority of his source and
corroborate it by using Homer himself to back it up.12

In the case of the Tragic Poets, no perspective is really provided as to whether or not they
believe in the historicity of the Trojan War – with the creation of their dramatic texts being the
most obvious suggestion that they do. In fact, the fact that the negative impacts of the war are at
least acknowledged by all three writers (most obviously Aeschylus) reinforces this argument, as
surely they would not be willing to present a war that they themselves (the Greeks) started in a
negative fashion if they did not believe it to have actually occurred.13 Herodotus, however,
clearly believes in the historicity of the Trojan War, if not in the more version popularised by

Jonas Grethlein and Christopher B. Krebs, (2012) ‘The Historian’s Plupast: introductory remarks on its forms and
functions’ in Grethlein, Jonas and Krebs, Christopher B. (ed) Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The
‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 5.
Herodotus (2003). The Histories. Trans. By Aubrey De Selincourt. London: Penguin Books. pp.600-604.
11
Lin Foxhall and Nino Luraghi, (2010). ‘Introduction’, in Foxhall, Lin., Gehrke, Hans- Joachim and Luraghi, Nino
(ed.) Intentional History: Spinning Time in Ancient Greece Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, pp. 11.
Johannes Haubold, (2007). ‘Xerxes’ Homer’ in Bridges, Emma, Hall, Edith and Rhodes, P. J. (ed.) Cultural
Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millenium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 50, 54, 60-61.
12
Suzanne Said, (2012). ‘Herodotus and the Myth of the Trojan War’ in Baragwanath, Emily and de Bakker,
Mathieu. (ed.) Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 90-91
Irene De Jong, (2012). ‘The Helen Logos and Herodotus’ Fingerprint’ in Baragwanath, Emily and de Bakker,
Mathieu. (ed.) Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 130-131.
13
Aeschylus (1991). Plays: Two: Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides. Trans. By
Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish. London: Methuen Drama, pp. 16, 21-23.
Sophocles (1990). Philoctetes. Trans. By R.G. Ussher. Warminster: Aris and Phillips, pp.43-45.
Euripides (2013). Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes. Trans. By William Arrowsmith, Richard
Lattimore and Elizabeth Wyckoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21.
Homer. Throughout his Histories, Herodotus’ use of references to the events of the Trojan War
to draw parallels and comparisons to the contemporary conflicts of the Trojan War he is
describing, suggests that he fully believes that the Trojan War did occur, even arguably
considering it to be part of ‘historical time’ rather than mythological time.14

Looking more specifically at the story of Helen during the Trojan War, Aeschylus is perhaps the
most direct in fully condemning her actions in going off with Paris willingly (debated if she did)
and presents her as an almost ‘monstrous’ figure who is responsible for the destruction of
thousands of Greek lives due to her beauty and promiscuity. In ‘Agamemnon’, both the chorus
of the citizens of Mycenae as well as the messenger and Agamemnon himself describe Helen in
highly destructive terms, setting her as the sole catalyst for the prolonged war. She is referred to
by the chorus as a “bringer of war”, a “war-whore” and a “spear-bride”, all of which show that
their view of Helen is that she is the cause of all their troubles, that she should be punished as
she is responsible for all the familial deaths they have suffered.15

Interestingly, it is Euripides who both supports this vision of Helen’s role in the war, as well as
presenting a much more sympathetic alternative. In his ‘Trojan Women’, it is suggested that
Helen went to Troy of her own free will and she herself is portrayed as highly eloquent, but also
skilled in manipulation as in seen in her speech to Menelaus to convince him not to kill her.16
Furthermore, she is described by Hecuba as a ‘fatal bride’, a “scandalous liar” and a lover of
luxury with an “abominable heart”, even being condemned by the god Poseidon, who says that
she is “rightly” being treated as a captive slave by the Greeks. 17 The obvious similarities in the
type of language employed to describe Helen by both Aeschylus and Euripides here – language
with extremely dark, almost evil connotations, strongly suggests that this was the common way

14
Suzanne Said, (2012). ‘Herodotus and the Myth of the Trojan War’ in Baragwanath, Emily and de Bakker,
Mathieu. (ed.) Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 88-89.
Herodotus (2003). The Histories. Trans. By Aubrey De Selincourt. London: Penguin Books. pp.425, 433.
15
Aeschylus (1991). Plays: Two: Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides. Trans. By
Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish. London: Methuen Drama, pp. 22-23.
16
Euripides (2013). Euripides III: Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion. Trans. By
William Arrowsmith, Anne Carson, Richard Lattimore and Ronald Frederick Willetts. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp.115-119.
17
Euripides (2013). Euripides III: Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion. Trans. By
William Arrowsmith, Anne Carson, Richard Lattimore and Ronald Frederick Willetts. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 95, 118-119.
to handle the figure of Helen and her role in the Trojan War, especially when creating a drama
piece.

However, Euripides’ play ‘Helen’ presents quite a different vision of her role during the war.
Here she is portrayed as a loyal and devoted wife who is overcome with grief at the suggestion
of Menelaus’ death, and subsequently equally overcome with joy when she discovers him after
his shipwreck.18 Not only is Helen portrayed as blameless in this drama, but her persistence in
refusing the efforts of Theoclymenus to force her to become his bride presents her as a highly
virtuous character, in stark contrast to how she is portrayed in accounts more well known to
society today.19 Euripides goes as far to have Helen question whether she should commit
suicide to protect her honour, saying “I’ll keep my body uncontaminated by disgrace” and
asking, “Was I born a monster among mankind?”20 This use of such highly evocative language
and having Helen recognise that it is in her name that so many have died allows Euripides to
quite successfully put across the idea that Helen was actually not at all to blame for the events of
the Trojan War and that her reputation and her honour has been unfairly violated.

Looking to contemporary prose accounts, it should be noted that Euripides’ focus here on
presenting a much more sympathetic portrayal of Helen, is reflected in other accounts by both
the philosopher Gorgias, and Herodotus. Both writers to an extent ‘defend’ Helen, though they
take considerably different approaches to the myths/stories surrounding her central role in the
war. Herodotus takes a decidedly historiographical approach, arguing that the more common
story of Helen having been present in Troy during the war is simply inaccurate, instead arguing
that, based on eyewitness accounts, the truth is that she had been spirited away to Egypt where
she could be protected by King Proteus. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this description
is where Herodotus says that he believes “Homer was familiar with the story” but that he simply
choose to ignore it as it did not suit the genre within which he was writing.21

18
Euripides (2013). Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes. Trans. By William Arrowsmith, Richard
Lattimore and Elizabeth Wyckoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 25-30.
19
Euripides (2013). Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes. Trans. By William Arrowsmith, Richard
Lattimore and Elizabeth Wyckoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21,31, 53-55.
20
Euripides (2013). Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes. Trans. By William Arrowsmith, Richard
Lattimore and Elizabeth Wyckoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21, 30.
21
James W. Neville, ‘Herodotus on the Trojan War’. Greece and Rome, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1977, pp. 4.
Herodotus (2003). The Histories. Trans. By Aubrey De Selincourt. London: Penguin Books. pp.139.
Furthermore, Herodotus shows a similarly rationalistic approach to Thucydides and later history
writers by not only showing disbelief in Homer’s account of the position of Helen during the
war, but in offering multiple reasons as to why – such as the fact it would have been illogical for
the Trojans not to hand Helen over to the Greeks if she was actually within the city. 22 In
addition it should be mentioned that though Herodotus does try repeatedly to present his
interpretation of the Trojan War as accurate, he acknowledges that this is “my own
interpretation”, an acknowledgement of the fact that that he may not be correct not fully
objective in his view.23 This is an admission rarely found in any classical texts, especially those
addressing Greek centric conflicts such as the Trojan War, which is notable considering how
most if not all of them have evolved from oral tales, and considering the “fluidity” of oral
tradition were highly unlikable to reached classical authors in its original accurate form (if one
ever truly existed).24

Gorgias’ ‘Encomium of Helen’ on the other hand, uses rhetoric and philosophy to present
various arguments that Helen should not be blamed for her actions – and subsequently, the
Trojan War itself. One example of this elaborate rhetorical style is when Gorgias suggests that
Helen may have been persuaded to go with Paris through the power of speech, before saying
that “abductor, as victimizer, committed injustice--and on the other hand that the abductee, as
victim, met with mishap”.25 Here Gorgias is handling the tale of the Trojan War very differently
to most other authors – he is manipulating it rhetorically in order to persuade his readers of
Helen’s innocence, rather than presenting what effectively amounts to character studies or
looking at the historicity of accounts surrounding Helen. Ironically however, it is Gorgias’s own
‘power of speech’ (rhetoric) that has caused his account to become quite controversial in its
presentation of Helen as being without fault, with multiple authors across the years drawing
attention to the theatricality, paradoxical and simply extreme nature of many of his arguments to

22
Irene De Jong, (2012). ‘The Helen Logos and Herodotus’ Fingerprint’ in Baragwanath, Emily and de Bakker,
Mathieu. (ed.) Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 134.
James. W Neville, ‘Herodotus on the Trojan War’. Greece and Rome, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1977, pp. 6-7.
Herodotus (2003). The Histories. Trans. By Aubrey De Selincourt. London: Penguin Books. pp.141-142.
23
Herodotus (2003). The Histories. Trans. By Aubrey De Selincourt. London: Penguin Books. pp.142.
24
Jonathan S Burgess, (2001) The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, pp. 3-5, 12-13 48-49.
Kurt A Raaflaub, ‘Homer, The Trojan War and History’. The Classical World, Vol. 91, No.5, 1998, pp. 395.
25
Brian. R Donovan’s 1999 translation of, H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th
ed., vol. 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1952, rpt. Dublin 1966).
show how his encomium is both unreliable and concerned more with illustrating the power of
rhetoric/logos than it actually is with repairing Helen’s reputation.26

It should of course be noted that the more widely accepted story surrounding Helen’s role in the
war is that presented in The Iliad by Homer (and reinforced by both Aeschylus and Euripides in
his Trojan Woman). It is however important to recognise that there were writers who believed
otherwise, and thus that Helen’s position as being the ‘catalyst’ for the Trojan War and being a
“man-destroying, city-destroying” dangerous woman should not automatically be taken as the
most accurate account simply because it has become the dominant one.27

It is clear that even amongst these three Athenian tragic poets, there were some extreme
divergences when it came to their handling of the Trojan War, similarly to how, as Ewen Bowie
details, poets and writers within other genres (such as Stesichorus, Sappho, Simonides and
Hecateus) all presented varying perspectives on the Trojan War and used it to put across
different messages.28 Whilst Sophocles focuses almost solely on manipulating ambiguous
language to illustrate Neoptolemus’ emotional struggle and ultimately presents the Greek
Heroes as having very questionable justifications for many of their actions during the Trojan
War, neither Agamemnon and Euripides choose to really address the morality of the heroes
whose ‘nostoi’ stories they are presenting. Both dramas portray their relevant Greek hero in a
mostly positive light, highlighting their high moral standards and in Agamemnon’s case refusal
to demonstrate his superiority returning from a war that has killed thousands of his kingdom’s
citizens.29 Interestingly, this ambivalence towards the morality of the war is also found across
much prose literature addressing the war - neither Thucydides or Herodotus, despite their strong
historiographical, rationalistic approaches to the past, really manage to come down on one side
or the other when it comes to the morality of the events of the war.

26
Diana Shaffer, ‘The Shadow of Helen: The Status of the Visual Image in Gorgias’s Encomium to Helen’.
Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, vol. 16, no.3, 1998. Pp 245-247.
Jonathan Pratt. “On the Threshold of Rhetoric: Gorgias' Encomium of Helen.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 34, no. 1,
(2015), pp. 165, 167-169.
27
Aeschylus (1982), Agamemnon, trans. D. M. MacDowell, Gorgias: Encomium of Helen, Translation and
Commentary. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Lines 681-689.
28
Ewen Bowie, (2010) ‘The Trojan War’s reception in early Greek lyric, iambic and elegiac poetry’, in Foxhall,
Lin., Gehrke, Hans- Joachim and Luraghi, Nino (ed.) Intentional History: Spinning Time in Ancient Greece Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner, pp. 57-88.
29
Aeschylus (1991). Plays: Two: Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides. Trans. By Frederic Raphael
and Kenneth McLeish. London: Methuen Drama, pp.28.
Additionally, it should be noted that the only characters mentioned by the Athenian tragic poets
who seem to express any kind of moral judgement on the war itself are those who were not
involved in the fighting – Philoctetes in Sophocles work, the citizens of Mycenae and
Clytaemnestra in that of Agamemnon and the Egyptian king Theoclymenus, as well as Hecuba
in the cases of Euripides’ Helen and Trojan Women respectively. This is perhaps interesting, as
it shows a similarity in that all three of these tragic dramatists considered it necessary, even
important, to include a character who could be argued to have a more objective view on the war
as they did not participate. Motivations for this could be varied, including a desire to show that
even in a work focused on presenting emotional drama they are not being entirely bias as well
as simply trying to show that the war was never something that everyone approved of.

In conclusion, what is perhaps the most striking similarity between the works of the tragic poets
and contemporary prose authors is their willingness to mostly side-line the moral arguments
surrounding the Trojan War and to focus on the lack of accuracy in military statistics, or on the
dramatic ‘nostoi’ that followed. Admittedly, all three tragic poets mentioned in this essay do
present characters who put forward a negative view of the war, but none of them are considered
key characters in their plays and unfortunately, their roles have not received as much scholarly
attention as those who are at the centre of the dramas, the same characters who express almost
wholly positive views of the events of the Trojan War. It is more noticeable the extent of the
varying approaches taken to the story of the Trojan War, perhaps highlighting the
manipulability of history and how all accounts, however different in approach – whether
dramatic, poetry based or historical - and however controversial in their opinion, should be
taken together in order to draw up as real a picture as possible of how the events of the Trojan
War truly panned out.
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