Noah Millman's essay on Euripides The Trojan Women is the best thing I've read since I got back. I saw a not very good college production once, but though the acting was weird, stilted, or overdone, the play itself was both beautiful and horrible. I remember thinking it was like watching souls being savagely crushed, and finding hope only in the fact that there had been souls to crush. But Mr. Millman is both more prolific and more profound on the topic than I, so go read it.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Trojan Women is very simply the most powerful anti-war work ever created. It makes modern efforts in that direction look like playground taunts. The work is so fiercely intense that it can overcome even bad translations and poor acting. It's a wonder the Athenians (the original target of the play's message) didn't immediately send Eurpides to the hemlock brewery after sitting through the first production.
I don't consider it an anti-war play, though this is the popular impression. The message (and I think there's a fair amount of evidence on my side, both textual and historical) is not don't go to war, but don't lose a war.
A Marine stationed in 'upper' South VN felt felt there was reason for Vietnamese ambivalence about our presence. One day Landing Craft arrived and a Vietnamese boy came up to him and said, 'Marines coming?' 'No, going away,' he responded. The boy hugged his leg tightly. We got off 'lightly' when we left VN in that only Vietnamese were murdered and tortured in direct response. But some of us I think fear this result may not be generalizable; you have to know the war aims of your opponent. The Iranians and the al Qaeda may have different ambitions. 9/11 in part suggested that. Nice review and interesting play. Not all wars are won by the equivalent of the American or even Soviet occupation force in Germany, and I think that needs to be considered when assessing the desirability of actions. In regard to JonF's comment about it's problem for the Athenians, in part it was asking them to be empathetic. This was an attitude that Caesar would later take in the Roman Civil War.
The Trojan Women had themes larger than simply being anti-war, which is one reason it's so powerful: it isn't simply a political screed. Behind the anti-war message is a deeper one about the fundamental cruelty of both men and gods, a theme that Euripides worked more fully in the Bacchai (Euripides is sometimes thought to have been an atheist, but he takes his gods far too seriously for that. One does not indict for cruelty and inhumanity that which one thinks does not exist). But yes, the play was written with a specific political purpose in mind: since antiquity it has been considered Euripides response to the act of genocide Athens committed against Melos. The Melians were not enemies of Athens; they were neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. But when they refused an "alliance" with (meaning subservience to) Athens, the city slaughtered their males and sold the remaining population into slavery.
As for Michael's post, one can lose a war with rather few consequences to one's homeland if the war was basically an aggressive one to start with, and the victorious foe is too weak or simply not inclined to carry the war beyond his own borders. However there is still no way to conquer (as opposed to defeat) a foreign nation without actually invading its homeland, defeating its armies (and possibly navies), reducing its strongholds, occupying it population centers and pacifying its people. Those of us who see rightwing attitudes toward the Middle East as paranoid and hysterical hold that view because we cannot conceive of any way that any Middle Eastern nation or group could achieve those things against even a medium-weight power let along a great power like the US.
JonF. The point about Melos is interesting. I think what George Bush has been interested in is avoiding economic or military envelopment. It is not so much the size of your force as Schlieffen pointed out about the Carthaginian victory at Cannae as it is: Can the enemy make a successful envelopment? Envelopment may involve the use of deidentified or supra state actors as did the attack on 9/11. The general, in this case Bush, must not merely stay in a defensive mode but rather attempt to envelop the enemy and deal with, as the Battle Hymn of the Republic states, 'where the grapes of wrath are stored.'