Euripides Endures

I heard a radio report on this extraordinary production of Euripides' The Trojan Women - a rare (unique?) example of something good coming out of the hideous Syrian conflict. In The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler (in the person of his protagonist Ernest Pontifex) fires off a lengthy polemic against the Greek tragedies, dismissing them as, by and large, sorry stuff that has been wildly overrated and will not endure. But, over the best part of two and a half millennia, they have endured, because they treat of things that never change - among them, sadly, war and exile and the suffering of the innocent.