The Failure of Athens -- At the festival of Dionysus in spring, 415 BC, in the seventeenth year of the Peloponnesian War, four months after Athens had attacked and destroyed the small and comparatively innocent island of Melos, three months before a vast expedition was sent out to add Sicily to her empire, Euripides produced one of his starkest tragedies, The Trojan Women, a bitter study of the cruelty of war, destructive for the conquered and no less demoralizing for the victor.