The Trojan Women powerfully depicts the horrors of war, and Murray assumed that Euripides meant it as a protest against atrocities committed by his own side in the war against Sparta and her allies that Athens was fighting at the time. This view still has some advocates; but those who are aware of the difference between a tragedy and a drame engagé see the play not as a protest against the behaviour of any actual persons, but as a portrayal of what the poet regards as a permanent feature of the human situation. This view of Euripides as a crusader for contemporary causes is eloquently expressed in Murray's book Euripides and his Age, published in 1913; the work is delightfully written, and (if you will forgive a personal reminiscence) did more than any other to make me want to be a scholar when I read it at the age of fourteen. But I now believe it to be almost totally misguided.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The Trojan Women powerfully depicts the horrors of war, and Murray assumed that Euripides meant it as a protest against atrocities committed by his own side in the war against Sparta and her allies that Athens was fighting at the time. This view still has some advocates; but those who are aware of the difference between a tragedy and a drame engagé see the play not as a protest against the behaviour of any actual persons, but as a portrayal of what the poet regards as a permanent feature of the human situation. This view of Euripides as a crusader for contemporary causes is eloquently expressed in Murray's book Euripides and his Age, published in 1913; the work is delightfully written, and (if you will forgive a personal reminiscence) did more than any other to make me want to be a scholar when I read it at the age of fourteen. But I now believe it to be almost totally misguided." in the context of "Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982), p. 208" to mean that wisdom is timeless.