o desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"

To the cities of this present day might the prophetess Cassandra speak
her message:

"Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!
Yet if war come, there is a crown in death
For her that striveth well and perisheth
Unstained: to die in evil were the stain!"

A throb of human sympathy as if with one of our sisters of to-day comes
to us at the end, when the city is destroyed and its queen would throw
herself, living, into its flames. To be of the action of this play the
imagination needs not to travel back over three thousand years of
history. It can simply leap a thousand leagues of ocean.

If ever wars are to be ended, the imagination of man must end them. To
the common mind, in spite of all its horrors, there is still something
glorious in war. Preachers have preached against it in vain; economists
have argued against its wastefulness in vain. The imagination of a great
poet alone can finally show to the imagination of the world that even
the glories of war are an empty delusion. Euripides shows us, as the
centre of his drama, women battered and broken by inconceivable
torture--the widowed Hecuba, Andromache with her child dashed to death,
Cassandra ravished and made mad--yet does he show that theirs are the
unconquered and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with
pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought
for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy
seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality of
our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan
Women at this moment of the history of the world.

FRANCIS HOVEY STODDARD.

_May the first, 1915_.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Judged by common standards, the Troaedes is far from a perfect play; it
is scarcely even a good play. It is an intense study of one great
situation, with little plot, little construction, little or no relief or
variety. The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of
all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a
suggestion that in the utterness of night, when all fears of a possible
worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory. But
the situation itself has at least this dramatic value, that it is
different from what it seems.

The consummation of a gre