A stand-alone edition of Euripides’s The Trojan Women, taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.

Drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s Complete Greek Tragedies series, this stand-alone edition presents Richmond Lattimore’s celebrated translation of a play with an antiwar message that continues to inspire and resonate with readers today. The Trojan Women takes place following the conquest of Troy and tells the story of its sole survivors—all women—who have been enslaved by the Greeks. Mourning their families and their fate, they grapple with the trauma they have experienced and contemplate a future far from home. 

The aftermath of the Trojan War, while extensively depicted in ancient Greek epic, lyric poetry, and art, is rendered especially powerful through the hands of Euripides. An introduction by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most provides essential contextual information about the play’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity.

Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) wrote some ninety plays, nineteen of which have survived. Richmond Lattimore (1906–84) was a poet, translator, and longtime professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr College. Glenn W. Most is a visiting member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Mark Griffith is the Klio Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literature and professor of classics and of theater, dance, and performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley.