This paper explores the articulation and representation of time in Euripides’ Trojan Women, which is of the essence for our appreciation of various aspects of the play, including its position in the trilogy, its dramaticaction as it develops under the pressure of time, its characters and their attitude to temporality, and its reflection of the ephemerality of live theatre. Temporality in Trojan Women develops a theme apparently present in, and evencentral to, the previous plays of the trilogy: both Alexander and Palamedes seem to foreground historical time as an agent of development and revelation (of human character, of social conventions, or of cultural achievements, amongother things). In Trojan Women itself, dramatic time coincides with real performance time but is complicated by the presence of several ‘ticking clocks’, i.e., important events which are represented as imminent (e.g., the departureof the Greek fleet, or the funeral rites for the murdered Astyanax) and create a sense of accelerating velocity. Further, mythic time, including the early history of humankind, is contradistinguished from human temporality as variously experienced by individual characters in what amounts to a visceral phenomenology of temporality, with the exception of Hecuba whose vision of temporality extends beyond the personal. Finally, the paper makes a case for Trojan Women being a study on the ephemeral but memorable temporality of live theatre.
