Kassandra in Euripides’ Trojan Women:
The Perversion of the Wedding Ritual

Rebecca M. Muich (University of Illinois)

It has been argued that the wedding ritual tends to be subverted in Greek tragedy (Seaford, 1987).  This paper will examine the not the subversion but the perversion of the ritual in Euripides’ Trojan Women, particularly in the case of Kassandra (lines 308- 461), chosen by Agamemnon as his concubine.  I will argue that Euripides perverts the marriage ritual of the parthenos to emphasize the suffering of the surviving women of Troy in the aftermath of the war.  By filtering the suffering of women through the lens of disrupted ritual, Euripides powerfully reminds his audience that war affects every stratum of society and that often the most intense suffering is not endured by the dead, but by the living.

I will evaluate the representation of Kassandra’s marriage through three different approaches.  First I will argue that the marriage hymn Kassandra sings is in structure and content similar to other marriage hymns found on the Greek stage (Birds, Peace, Phaethon) and lyric poetry (Sappho, Catullus 61 and 62) but is ironic and even uncomfortable in the context of her status as future concubine to the conquering king.  The structure of the song and repeated references to herself and her bridegroom as makarios suggests this was meant to be the blessing hymn sung to the couple by their family and friends.  Yet the sight of Kassandra carrying her wedding torch, her invocations of Hekate and Apollo, her insistence that her mother and the chorus dance and rejoice, and repeated muttering by Talthybios that she has gone mad present ironic visual and verbal cues to the audience and signal a pending doom for Kassandra.

Secondly I will argue that the pathos of her situation is amplified through frequent reminders that she is a young virgin of marriageable age.  The cry of euan, euoi, the cry of the maenad, seems out of place in the marriage hymn, and has often been explained away as a reference to her madness.  However, equating the parthenos with the bacchant was not unprecedented (cf. Persephone in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 386).  It signified a dangerously wild quality of the unmarried parthenos, a sentiment echoed in marriage hymns depicting marriage as the taming of a wild animal (often represented by the verb damazo).  It also signified the unbalanced nature of some parthenoi, who suffered from the “wandering womb syndrome” described by the Greek medical writer Hippocrates.  The onset of puberty was often accompanied by bouts of “hysteria” for which doctors prescribed sexual intercourse and pregnancy as cures.  Marriage is the final solution for dangerous and unbalanced young women, of whom Kassandra is a prime example. 

Thirdly, I will argue that Kassandra’s characterization in Trojan Women is a conflation of two different perversions of the parthenos’ wedding: bride of death epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone and the self-sacrificing virgin exemplified by Polyxena (in Hecuba), Iphegenia (in Iphigenia at Aulis), and Antigone.  The first representation, in which the woman’s death and entombment are re-imagined as a marriage to Hades and a bridal chamber (Dowden, 1989; Rehm, 1994), emphasizes that unnaturalness of a young woman dying before she was married – in essence dying before she attained the honor of serving her polis completely.  The second representation (Lefkowitz, 1995) allows the virgin to choose death as an alternative service to the state.  Instead of marrying and producing children, she sacrifices herself in order to save their city-states.  Kassandra embraces both roles: she views her marriage to Agamemnon as a death (but also eerily relates her own actual death), and she rejoices in the opportunity to avenge her family and the fallen Troy.  But Euripides tinges her triumph with irony as the audience remembers that Kassandra will not exact the revenge she is plotting and she will not die a parthenos or even a wedded-wife, but a war concubine.