In the beginning, Troy was meant to be a perfect city built by the Gods. After it was taken over by humans, it was a proud and happy city that was full of freedom. The women in Troy were especially free, given most of the same freedoms as men were given. King Priam and Queen Hecuba ruled together and made mutual decisions. Other women in the city were given important positions as well. This is what made Troy a special city, unique from the other cities at the time. As the tension between Troy and Greece heightened, Troy did everything in its power to ward off the Greeks. The Trojans were known to be a race of kind people who fought with honor. The Greeks, however, were known as the “bad boys” and never fought by the rules. This is illustrated throughout the war, from the Troilus versus Achilles fight to the very end when the Trojan horse slipped through the gates of Troy. To win the war, the Trojans felt they must fight unfairly as the Greeks did. This is how they started to change.
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As the war raged on, Troy became more like its enemy—the Greeks. This isn’t good because even if the Trojans had won the war and driven the Greeks out, their post-
war society would have been very different from the pre-war society. The Trojans would have lost everything they stood for. One part of war is to kill more people than your opponent, but you must keep your dignity in doing so. If the Trojans had succeeded in keeping the Greeks out of their city, then the Greeks wouldn’t have viewed it as a total loss. This is because the Greeks turned the Trojans into one of their own kind deceptive, dishonest, and dishonorable. The Trojans no longer knew what they were fighting for. “Then we all forgot the reason for the war.” (Wolf 68) They had two enemies—the Greeks and themselves. On one hand, they wanted to kill off the Greeks, but on the other hand, they are fighting a battle with themselves. In the battle with themselves, they don’t realize that they are ostracizing their women and mirroring the Greeks. The main point of war is not to kill more people, but to make a statement in doing so. If the Greeks had made the Troy a mirror of Greece, then the Greeks would have won the real war no matter who kills more enemies.
The reader might now ask in what ways Troy became more like Greece. The most obvious example is its treatment of women. Before the war, women and men were almost equal and everyone was considered a citizen. During the war however, public opinion changed and the citizens started viewing men as superior to the women. There are several reasons for this. The main reason is war became the most important part of Trojan society. During the war, citizens had nothing else on their minds besides the war. As the Trojans sent their men out to fight, the women were left behind because they were
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too weak to fight. As the men gained the privilege to fight, the women were refused this right, and therefore, the gap between men and women started to grow bigger. The influence of the Greeks also played a major role in the change of Troy’s women. While the Trojans viewed women as capable as men in both social and intellectual skills, the Greeks viewed them as concubines who were supposed to cook and care for the children as the men held all the important positions. As the war went on, the Trojans began to
implement more of the actions of the Greeks. This caused their morals to change for the worse, and become more like the morals of the Greeks. The Greeks’ morals were considered barbaric and inhuman to the Trojans at the time, but little did they know that they were slowly becoming like their enemies. One example of this is the fact that the Trojan men started to separate from their women and go on their own. Public opinion changed and the men of society viewed women as inferior, and in a way, the men of Troy started to ostracize the women. Even King Priam started ignoring Hecuba and made political decisions without her.
The war was of great significance to the Trojans for several reasons. For one thing, it changed their society for the worse. It also showed that the men should not have broken ties with their women. They may have lost the war and the city because of this. One thing the reader should learn from this novel is that Troy used to be the perfect city of equality, but changed for the worse to become like Greece.
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Works Cited
Wolf, Christa. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc, 1984.
