The founding insight of tragic wisdom is that all are born to die. Herodotus tells a story that the Persian king Xerxes wept as he watched his magnificent army stride past him on its way to defeat and near destruction at Greek hands. The king couldn’t have known he would lose, but he knew that even the youngest, strongest, and most indomitable of his warriors would be dust in time. This is the poignant knowledge of what it means to be human that defines tragedy.

From the Greeks to modern times, the incontrovertible fact of human mortality marks the most sorrowful works of imagination. Even when the tragic figures are kings and nobles, the perfect democracy of death prevails: Hamlet and King Lear (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?” laments Lear over Cordelia’s body), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (“Webster was much possessed by death, / And saw the skull beneath the skin,” as T.S. Eliot put it), John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea (“No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied”), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“Stay around and they would kill you”), and the philosophizing, sometimes tenderhearted and sometimes iron-hearted, of Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Unamuno, and Heidegger.

The ancient Athenians, whose cultural high point began with the Persians’ shocking reversal of fortune, were always acutely conscious of human fragility. The greatest souls among them were marked by what Friedrich Nietzsche called amor fati: the love of fate that makes a man grateful even for the ordeals and sorrows that help to forge him. Giving form and expression to this noble sentiment was the signal achievement of Aeschylus (ca. 525–455 B.C.) and Sophocles (ca. 495–405 B.C.), the high classical masters of tragic drama. The moral horror of Oedipus’ helpless downfall in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (ca. 429 B.C.) gives way to “wondrous terror” in Oedipus at Colonus (401 B.C.) as the aged penitent is seized miraculously from the earth into a numinous afterlife. After years of sorrow and remorse, the blind exile goes at last to a sublimely unspeakable end, made glorious by his trials. Some men must be broken by the gods in order to be made worthy of the highest blessings.

But Euripides (ca. 484–407 B.C.), the youngest of the three classical tragedians whose work survives, was not so certain that even suffering could bring redemption. Of the three, he was the one who internalized most deeply the truth that all things—cities as well as people, ideals as well as armies—must one day suffer destruction. Today, Euripides has 19 plays to show for a career in which he is believed to have staged 88. These came in 22 sets of four (three tragedies followed by a comic satyr play) presented at the City Dionysia festival in a competition he won only five times, once posthumously. His avant-garde style—rhythmically experimental, riddled with cryptic turns of phrase—inspired youthful enthusiasm and conservative skepticism in equal measure. It was unsparingly satirized by the prankster Aristophanes in Frogs (405 B.C.), when the tragedian’s body had not long lain cold in the ground. But his formal innovations were only the surface expression of a far more deep-seated artistic daring that has both fascinated and disgusted audiences ever since.

In the Poetics, Aristotle calls Euripides “unquestionably the most tragic of the dramatists.” To be sure, he is the bleakest. Though he was not a soldier, he could not help being caught up in the Peloponnesian War between the Athenian and Spartan empires. It was the most momentous and destructive war the Greeks had ever known, and it dominated the last quarter century of Euripides’ life. The two great powers’ merciless fight to the death worked its implacable iron into the artist’s soul. Alongside Thucydides, the peerless historian, Euripides left behind the fullest and most brutally honest record of the material and psychic devastation wreaked by the conflict upon Athenian society. Although the playwright never mentions contemporary events directly, scholars have pointed out that the looming shadow of war almost always hangs over his work.

Friends and Enemies

Euripides’ grimmest plays deal with men and women broken irremediably by what can only be described as divine malevolence. The gods of his plays are so far beyond human conceptions of good and evil as to be monstrous—indifferent to human agony, inaccessible to human imprecation, perhaps even delighted with the pain they cause. There is nothing you can learn from suffering in their clutches that will make you love your fate or give you anything like satisfaction. Such is Aphrodite in Hippolytus (428 B.C.), who destroys the title character for his fierce determination to shun her rites and remain a virgin. Aphrodite drives Hippolytus’ stepmother wild with lust for him, remorselessly involving her in the plot even though she has given no offense. So too Dionysus, in The Bacchae (405 B.C.), gleefully arranges for the defiant unbeliever Pentheus to be dismembered at the hands of his mother, Agave.

But it is in his portrayals of the Trojan War, and the legendary war of the Seven against Thebes, that Euripides adumbrates the most gruesome events of his own day. His three tragedies of war—his most remarkable works—are Hecuba (ca. 425), The Trojan Women (415), and The Suppliant Women (ca. 423). (Throughout, I quote from the University of Chicago Press translations, originally edited by classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore and updated by the University of Chicago’s Glenn W. Most and UC Berkeley’s Mark Griffith for the third edition released in 2013.)

Hecuba is the Trojan queen, Priam’s wife and the mother of 50 sons. The play named for her finds her on the shores of Thrace, where Agamemnon’s victorious Greeks have made camp on their way home with their female captives from Troy. The action begins with an apparition. The ghost of Polydorus—the last of Hecuba’s sons to have died—reveals that he was treacherously murdered by the Thracian king Polymnestor, to whose care he was entrusted. Polymnestor killed the boy for the gold he had brought with him, then tossed his body into the sea. His corpse, the ghost tells the audience, will wash up on shore that day, and his mother will learn of his death. Polyxena, one of her two last daughters still living, will be sacrificed to placate the insatiably bloodthirsty ghost of Achilles.

When the chorus of Trojan slave women hear of the upcoming sacrifice, they erupt into the frantic piety of those with no other hope: “Call on heaven’s gods! / Invoke the gods below!” The gods do not answer. Polyxena, for her part, declares herself happy to die. But Hecuba tries to save her life anyway, imploring her own new master, Odysseus, for mercy. She reminds him that once, in Troy, when he was caught spying in the city disguised as a beggar, he entreated her for his life—pathetically, cravenly, shamefully—and she granted his plea. The beloved epic hero is anything but heroic here: he insists on the beautiful young girl’s death to propitiate an inviolable idol. Euripides plainly despises the slick wordsmith Odysseus and treats the canonical heroes of Greek myth with acerbic skepticism. Over and against them he extols the noble courage of the defeated, helpless women. Polyxena dies bravely—partly because she does not want to prove herself a coward, but mostly, she says, because she sees nothing left worth living for.

The compassionate Greek herald Talthybius, reporting Polyxena’s death, is moved to question the very existence of the gods: are they but “unsubstantial dreams / and lies, while random careless chance and change / alone control the world?” The gods never do show their faces, or even their handiwork, in this unflinchingly desolate play. There may be ghosts and soothsayers, but there is no sign of divinity, desperately as the women hope for one. When Hecuba learns of Polydorus’ murder, she begs Agamemnon to punish Polymnestor and to honor not only divine imperative but also an order of being higher even than the gods: “Upon this moral law the world depends; / through it the gods exist; by it we live, / defining good and evil.” Human justice, she goes on, is wholly dependent on this supreme reality. We are lost without it.

But Agamemnon sputters that ultimate law does not figure in his calculation: the only absolute is that of friends and enemies. The Greeks consider Polymnestor a friend and Polydorus an enemy; Agamemnon would like to do right by Hecuba, but his hands are tied. So Hecuba takes all-too-human justice into her own hands, contriving a trap for the greedy Polymnestor in which she and other slave women blind him and kill his young sons. Even the splendidly regal Hecuba is reduced to savagery when she has been stripped of all hope. Like Thucydides, Euripides understands what it means to lose everything.

Desolation of War

The impotence of the gods themselves in an uncaring universe is the theme of The Trojan Women, in which  the gods are impotent in this uncaring universe. The scene is the outskirts of the fallen city, and the gods command the stage for the first 100 lines; their sorrowful valediction to devastated Troy colors the entire play. The sea god Poseidon—portrayed in the Iliad as a pro-Greek partisan but here shown as devoted to Troy—departs the city he loves in helpless grief. “Now the gods’ groves are desolate,” he groans, “their thrones of power / blood-spattered.” Poseidon blames the heartless Athena for Troy’s downfall, and she suddenly appears to inform him that now the Greeks are the new objects of her anger: that lummox Ajax desecrated her temple, dragging his captive Cassandra there by force. Poseidon agrees to do his worst on the Greeks’ voyage home.

With this opening salvo from the deities, Euripides is engaging in a rearguard action to restore the relevance of divine justice to a world of pure power politics. But he can only attempt to rehabilitate the gods halfheartedly and even ironically: his deities seem self-absorbed and mostly unmoved by the human wreckage for which they are partly responsible. As various commentators have pointed out, The Trojan Women was presented a few months after the massacre and enslavement of the Melians by the Athenians, driven by pure self-interest. Thucydides, writing well after that episode, had the Athenian envoy deliver the famous line that “the strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.” This nihilist justification for Athenian ruthlessness rings true to the sentiment of Euripides’ bitter drama.

Trojan Women also appeared just after the catastrophic Athenian decision to launch an expedition against Sicily. This misadventure would end, in Thucydides’ words, with “total destruction”: captive Athenian soldiers packed into quarries, sweltering by day, freezing by night, dying of starvation and disease spread by decaying corpses. “[E]verything was destroyed,” wrote Thucydides, “and few out of many returned home.” Though Euripides couldn’t have known this would be the outcome, foreboding hangs heavy over The Trojan Women, as if he sensed that Athens’ godless amorality must inevitably bring disaster before long.

Euripides’ great theme in this play is the abiding desolation that war inevitably leaves in its wake. The fields where children once ran, the marriage beds of warriors’ widows, the confident young manhood of the defeated soldiers, all are reduced to “desolation” (erēmia). Even hope, the survivors’ one consolation, is eroded bit by bit. Andromache, widow of the Trojan hero Hector, loses even her infant son, Astyanax, whom the Greeks murder for fear he might one day avenge his father’s death. Victory, Euripides teaches, cannot assuage the fear of retribution. The Greeks hurl the child from the battlements of the dying city. Suffering in Euripides’ world produces not so much wisdom as knowledge—unbearable knowledge of the irredeemable nature of things. No small part of Euripides’ triumph is his fearless honesty about the savagery of men and women, especially in wartime, who have forgotten or never cared that there is such a thing as divine justice. And it may of course even be true that there are no gods at all.

Of course, Aeschylus and Sophocles were no strangers to existential dread. Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458 B.C.) depicts serial familial slaughter followed by a divine intervention that raises more questions than it answers, suggesting that comprehensible principles of human justice may be unattainable. The House of Atreus is a family unhappy in its own way, snarled in generations of murder among kin. In the trilogy, Orestes murders his mother, Clytemnestra, in vengeance for her having murdered his father, Agamemnon, in order to avenge Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia. Orestes is under orders issued in no uncertain terms from Apollo’s sacred oracle. All the same, matricide is an unforgivable crime. The terrifying Furies, among the most ancient of goddesses, hound Orestes unceasingly until Athena tames them with the reminder that she alone knows where Zeus keeps his thunderbolts. She defuses the tension without resolving the mystery: how can these killings be right and wrong at the same time? Every person in these plays demands justice, but can see only so far into the cosmic darkness, where all hope against hope that a saving light must be found. It never really is; Nietzsche encapsulates the insoluble conundrum at the core of the Aeschylean tragedy of mystery: “All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both.”

Yet Euripides’ shades of spiritual darkness are deeper still. His world is stripped even of the mystery that stuns human beings into awe at tragic suffering beyond the scope of reasoned explanation. For Euripides the brute facts of human pain do not come wrapped in some impenetrable enigma; they deserve no “wondrous terror” but rather an outraged revulsion, as at something half-rotted and disgusting. Where Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragic wisdom stands amazed and stupefied by unanswerable questions, Euripidean knowledge presents the terrible answers without flinching.

Athenians of the 5th century were familiar with war as an existential threat—a phrase almost meaningless with overuse today, but speaking forthrightly then to the danger of utter annihilation at enemy hands. To have fallen to the invading Persians, inveterate mortal foes, would have meant the end of civilized life as the Athenians had known it. Athenians fought the Persian Wars with desperate heroism. Aeschylus participated in the two crucial battles: at Marathon in 490 B.C., where he lost a brother, and at Salamis ten years later. He was so proud of his courageous service that the inscription on his tombstone, said to have been his own composition, records his participation at Marathon but completely overlooks his career as the leading Athenian playwright of the era. His play The Persians (472 B.C.) celebrates the Athenian naval victory at Salamis by way of commiseration with the defeated and words of caution for the victors.

In Thucydides’ account, the Greeks’ valorous resolve and cautious humility gave way to jealous suspicion and cynicism. Athens felt compelled to expand its empire more and more, “fear being our principal motive”; Spartan friendship soured to enmity. “Almost all hated us”: Athens had to grow greater and greater or risk losing everything. The notorious Melian Dialogue embodies the inhuman cruelty that accompanies this kind of moral decline. The meeting between Athens and Melos is not a negotiation but a directive, to defy which means ruin, as Athenian envoys instruct a refractory island city in the inconsequence of justice human or divine. “The Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.”

This morally debased world is precisely the one Euripides recognizes as his own: the world as the hardest men see it, and the only one they believe there is. It is difficult to say whether Thucydides, so laconic and cool when he addresses the worst, is secretly revolted by this barbaric unmasking of the supposedly civilized world. But Euripides does not try to conceal his indignation. And there is another obvious difference between Thucydides’ depiction of war and Euripides’. In the History of the Peloponnesian War, women are seldom seen and never heard, which is as Thucydides has Pericles declare it should be. Women’s suffering is dispensed with brusquely; when they appear at all it is briefly and en masse, for instance as they are being led into slavery. In Euripides, though, the pain and anger of women is indispensable to understanding what war is and what it does to the soul. Their individual voices are heard and their courage in the midst of hot anguish prominently articulated.

Virtue Without Piety

The Suppliant Women (ca. 420-415 B.C.) embodies this approach and presents Euripides’ most direct indictment of war. The play opens in the temple of Demeter—goddess of harvest, bounty, and renewal. Aethra, mother of Theseus, founder and king of Athens, had come to pray for fruitfulness. But her prayer becomes a threnody for the women left childless by Argos’ recent failed assault on Thebes. In a gross violation of sacred law, the triumphant Thebans have refused to allow the bodies of the Argive dead at the city gates to be buried. Aethra, the Argive king Adrastus, and the Chorus of bereaved Argive mothers join rhetorical forces to implore Theseus to send Athenian power into the fight for pious justice.

At first, Theseus resists. He initially appears as the embodiment of moderation, the spokesman for the settled and peaceable life—quite a contrast to the venturesome and meddlesome Athenian character one often sees in Thucydides. Theseus chides Adrastus for having been “led astray by glory-loving youngsters” who have acted against the interests of the orderly, unassuming middle-class majority. Here is the voice of soft-spoken Athenian wisdom as one wishes it were commonly heard. Theseus finally agrees to try and convince the Theban king, Creon, to see reason; Creon responds by sending a bombastic herald who sneers at Athens’ subjection to demagoguery and mob rule. Theseus assures the herald that he will use force to compel the burial. To Adrastus he observes that virtue is worthless without the piety that wins divine favor: “Human excellence means nothing / Unless it works with the consent of God.”

Theseus’ army prevails. True to his word, he does not breach the Theban walls but only gathers the dead outside them. It is a sad victory, of course, for collective mourning follows hard upon it. But Theseus refrains from conducting a roll call of the dead among the sorrowing Argives:

One thing I ask not, or you’d laugh at me;

Beside whom every warrior stood in battle,

Or from what foe he took a spear-wound. Vain

To tell or hear such tales—as if a man

In the thick of combat, with a storm of spears

Before his eyes, ever brought back sure news

On who was hero.

But such a detailed accounting of death and valor is exactly what occupies passage after passage of Homer’s Iliad. It follows from Theseus’ scorn that all of epic poetry rests on a foundation of extravagant lies. Euripides, in contrast to Homer, knows that combat is mass suffering, mass death, and disorder amounting to chaos.

Euripides would seem here to agree less with his fellow tragedians than with the comic poet Aristophanes: peaceful life, simple pleasures, and absence of the worst torments is best. The cost in human suffering is too high a price to pay for military glory and honor. But at the last moment Athena appears, dea ex machina, to lay down the divine law and rebuke humanity for excessive tenderheartedness in the face of war’s agonies. First she orders the Argives to swear they will come to the aid of Athens if it is ever attacked. Then she goes on to proclaim that when these Argive boys are men they will sack Thebes—the very thing that Theseus, in the name of justice and peace, would not do. Argive glory will flourish at Theban expense, she assures the eager children: “Your coming / Will bring them sorrow—lion-cubs you are, / True-bred sackers of cities!” The evil of warfare, whose persistence the Chorus lamented, will never abate while the Olympian taste for glorious human suffering prevails—however the wiser human beings might feel about it.

Senseless Matrix of Despair

War with its threat of total destruction is the worst thing Euripides knows. One finds the Euripidean mood revived in much of our most admired modern war literature. This elegiac tone, half-acerbic and half-keening, is heard in Herman Melville’s 19-line poem “Shiloh: A Requiem (April 1862),” which memorializes the bloody struggle around the town church.

The church so lone, the log-built one,

That echoed to many a parting groan

And natural prayer

Of dying foemen mingled there—

Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—

Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)

Evidently the grave moral question of slavery, over which the Civil War is being fought, recedes into insignificance in the light of soldiers’ suffering and death. Not only “the bubble reputation” but also any imperative that puts life and limb in such peril is outright deception. Writing of the First World War a half-century later, Ezra Pound eviscerates all national honor with his curt and cutting emendation of Horace: “Died some pro patria, non dulce, / non et decor.” Wilfred Owen, who was released from a shell-shock clinic to be killed a week before the war’s end, likewise puts paid to “the old Lie” that it is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country. George Orwell describes the characteristic atmosphere of the literature of the Great War as “a nightmare happening in a void”—which would be an apt epigraph for Hecuba or The Trojan Women.

As for the Second World War, which realized total destruction more dramatically than ever before, the most popular novels to come out of it are Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Heller’s chief premise is that to be willing to risk your life in war is literal insanity. Vonnegut tells the story of a GI who survives the fire-bombing of Dresden, “the greatest massacre in European history,” as a prisoner of war. He does time in a mental hospital, having “found life meaningless, partly because of what [he] had seen in war,” and then becomes a mental traveler through time and space, reaching the planet of Tralfamadore, whose inhabitants will eventually destroy the universe.

The theme that jumps out across the millennia is the irredeemable bestiality of war, the worst offense against human decency and the senseless matrix of despair. It is a sentiment nurtured by democracy. Euripides’ innovation as a tragedian writing for a democratic city was to place the highest value on the preservation of life itself as against the heroic martial virtues, with their emphasis on personal and civic honor and their manly pride in courting danger. This feeling for the supreme virtues of peace was familiar from the wartime comedies of Aristophanes such as Lysistrata (411 B.C.) and Peace (421), but alien to the tragic stage. And to give such new emphasis to the virtues of women in wartime—from their sensitivity and vulnerability to their extraordinary powers of endurance and their fearlessness when death arrives—was another of Euripides’ formidable moral feats.

In 408, at the age of 70, heartsick at Athenian degeneration and the prospect of worse to come, Euripides removed himself to the court of Archelaus in Macedon, where he died two years later. The year after that, Athens fell to the hated Spartans. Although many Greek cities called for Athens’ total destruction, Spartan forbearance unexpectedly spared it the worst. The walls were torn down, and the democracy abolished, but the annihilation that the city feared most—that every city feared most—did not come to pass this time. Euripides had seen the most grotesque and bitter realities of war more clearly than perhaps any of his contemporaries. But the disasters he chronicled were not the whole picture.

Likewise, however powerful and sometimes wise these plays are about the war of his time and place, the Euripidean mood should hardly be morally definitive in all cases. The Civil War and the Second World War were both necessary and fought for the best of reasons; the view of the Great War as a nightmare in a void led to a pernicious radical pacifism that unmanned democracies and allowed tyrants to rearm. So Euripides shines best in his context. In his lifetime his native city was perennially at war, and so was he in his own way: at war with heartless gods, with human folly, injustice, and cruelty, with the unfeeling world into which men and women are hurled. To his death, he never stopped fighting.