Un Parthénon de mots: Les Troyennes d'Euripide

International audienceI shall argue that in his Trojan Women, Euripides makes use of verbal, visual and structural allusions to the recently built Parthenon in order, firstly, to draw 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, and secondly, to respond by refering to the city's emblematic sacred building and Treasury to the glorification of Athens' problematic hegemony. In his prologue, while setting the Trojan scene, Euripides clearly seeks to prevent the mythical past from obliterating the present and the audience from forgetting their actual surroundings. To begin with, I will show that in the context of performance, the deictics used by Poseidon allow a reference to both fictional and real spaces. This duality is activated and enhanced by the mention of the wooden horse that « men of the future will call doureios » (l. 13-14), for it evokes a statue of the Trojan horse recently erected on the Acropolis and mentally locates the spectators on the top of the hill that rises behind them. By turning Poseidon into an ally of Troy and having Athena appear next to him on the top of the skene, Euripides then creates a visual reminiscence of the scene represented on the Parthenon's West pediment: that of the two gods fighting over Attica. From then on, the play develops as a series of tableaux depicting iconic scenes of an Iliou Persis. I argue that, given the elements set in place by the prologue, these are meant to allude not to any Iliou Persis, but to the Northern frieze of the Parthenon, framed, as is the play, by a divine meeting and the departure of the Greek ships. The tragedy thus appears as a dramatic itinerary and a mental journey from the Western to the Eastern side of the building, episods and stasima alternating as do metopes and triglyphs. Within this parallel structure, the body of young Astyanax brought on stage at the beginning of the exodos in the shield of his father can be interpreted as a tragic counterpart of the great statue of Athena and her shield which could be seen through the Western door. Thus Euripides builds with his words an anti-Parthenon, a monument to the victims of Athens' triumphant imperialism. His tragedy rivals and undermines the city's architectural gesture and assertion of power while suggesting that Astyanax embodies not only the Melians' recent defeat, but also the predictable, maybe imminent downfall of their Athenian conquerors