Euripides's The Trojan Women picks up where Homer's Iliad leaves off and offers a moving and philosophically provocative portrait of the most prominent Trojan women in the aftermath of Troy's loss in the war against the Greeks. The play doesn't follow a typical unified narrative but rather tells the story through portraits of the women concerned: Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, and Helen, each of whom is a powerful character and each of whom responds to the fall of Troy in a different way. Their different responses play into the various themes of the play: death, glory, honor, slavery and freedom, and faithfulness.

It is also a play that can be read as a denunciation of war and what it reduces people to: the senseless act of killing Astyanax is an illustration of this. The war is over, the Greeks have won, Andromache has lost her husband, and then the supposedly honorable Greeks toss her young son from the battlements of Troy for no clear purpose. War, we see, reduces even formerly honorable people to barbarians.

The speeches of Andromache and Hecuba also compel us to think about the tenability of hope in the face of devastation; Andromache also offers thoughtful insights on the very nature of death and the potential desirability of death in certain circumstances. Cassandra's speech to the Trojan women is also an interesting meditation on hope: she argues, quite paradoxically, that Troy is better off than any Greek state.

While the play can be read as taking a stance that vilifies, quite completely, the character of Helen of Troy, it's one of the earliest literary works in which she actually has a voice and is given the chance to provide arguments in her favor. Even though Hecuba challenges all that Helen says, Helen attempts to explain the war as something far beyond her control and thus something for which she cannot be blamed.