THE TROJAN WOMEN
OF EURIPIDES

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
GILBERT MURRAY, L.L.D., D.LITT.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH: 35 WEST 32ND STREET
LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD
1915

-

THE TROJAN WOMEN

IN his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the
usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. "It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs
of the world wrought into music." Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world.
In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic
lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic.
It even goes beyond the limited tragic, and hints that beyond the defeat may come a
greater glory than will be the fortune of the victors. And thus through its pity and terror
it purifies our souls to thoughts of peace.

Great art has no limits of locality or time. Its tidings are timeless, and its messages are
universal. The Trojan Women was first performed in 415 BC, from a story of the siege of Troy
which even then was ancient history. But the pathos of it is as modern to us as it was to the
Athenians. The terrors of war have not changed in three thousand years. Euripides had that
to say of war which we have to say of it to-day, and had learned that which we are even now
learning, that when most triumphant it brings as much wretchedness to the victors as to the
vanquished. In this play the great conquest "seems to be a great joy and is in truth a great 
misery." The tragedy of war has in no essential altered. The god Poseidon mourns over Troy
as he might over the cities of to-day, when he cries:

"How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"

To the cities of this present day might the prophetess Cassandra speak her message:

"Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!
Yet if war come, there is a crown in death
For her that striveth well and perisheth
Unstained: to die in evil were the stain!"

A throb of human sympathy as if with one of our sisters of to-day comes to us at the end,
when the city is destroyed and its queen would throw herself, living, into its flames.
To be of the action of this play the imagination needs not to travel back over three
thousand years of history. It can simply leap a thousand leagues of ocean.

If ever wars are to be ended, the imagination of man must end them. To the common mind, in
spite of all its horrors, there is still something glorious in war. Preachers have preached
against it in vain; economists have argued against its wastefulness in vain. The imagination
of a great poet alone can finally show to the imagination of the world that even the glories
of war are an empty delusion. Euripides shows us, as the centre of his drama, women battered
and broken by inconceivable torture - the widowed Hecuba, Andromache with her child dashed
to death, Cassandra ravished and made mad - yet does he show that theirs are the unconquered
and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with pride, have remorse and
mockery dealt out to them by those they fought for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never
surely can a great tragedy seem more real to us, or purge our souls more truly of the unreality
of our thoughts and feelings concerning vital issues, than can The Trojan Women at this moment
of the history of the world.

Francis Hovey Stoddard.
May the first, 1915.

-

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

JUDGED by common standards, the Troades is far from a perfect play; it is scarcely even a good 
play. It is an intense study of one great situation, with little plot, little construction,
little or no relief or variety. The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of
all the familiar lights of human life, with, perhaps, at the end, a suggestion that in the
utterness of night, when all fears of the possible worse thing are passed, there is in some
sense peace and even glory. But the situation itself has at least this dramatic value, that
it is different from what it seems.

The consummation of a great conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans and thanksgivings, the 
very height of the day-dreams of the unregenerate man - it seems to be a great joy, and
it is in truth a great misery. It is conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and
nothing remains but to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the
conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men, after long torment,
now resting in death. But the living drama for Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is
from them that he has named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly
lit and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and barely
articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.

Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull, but that it is too
harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the due limits of tragic art. There are
points to be pleaded against this criticism. The very beauty of the most fearful scenes,
in spite of their fearfulness, is one; the quick comfort of the lyrics is another, falling
like a spell of peace when the strain is too hard to bear (cf. p. 89). But the main defence
is that, like many of the greatest works of art, the Troades is something more than art.
It is also prophesy, a bearing of witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, 
walks outside the regular ways of the artist.

For some time before the Troades was produced, Athens, now entirely in the hands of the
War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which, though on military grounds defensible, 
was bitterly resented by the more humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as
the great crucial crime of the war. She had succeeded in compelling the neutral Dorian
island of Melos to take up arms against her, and after a long siege had conquered the
quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred the men and sold the women and children
into slavery. Melos fell in the autumn of 416 BC. The Troades was produced in the
following spring. And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at
sea for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Melos, flushed with conquest
and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege, was actually preparing to
set sail for its fatal enterprise against Sicily.

Not, of course, that we have in the Troades a case of political allusion. Far from it.
Euripides does not mean Melos when he says Troy, nor mean Alcibiades' fleet when he speaks
of Agamemnon's. But he writes under the influence of a year which to him, as to Thucydides,
had been filled full of indignant pity and of dire foreboding. This tragedy is perhaps, in 
European literature, the first great expression of the spirit of pity for mankind exalted 
into a moving principle; a principle which has made the most precious, and possibly the most
destructive, elements of innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of at 
least two great religions.

Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the organised force of
society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven
within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those
qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balance of sacrifices,
of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the
paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings not peace,
but a sword.

So it was with Euripides. The Troades itself has indeed almost no fierceness and singularly
little thought of revenge. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world
wrought into music, as it were, and made beautiful by "the most tragic of the poets." But
its author lived ever after in a deepening atmosphere of strife and even hatred, down to
the day when, "because almost all in Athens rejoiced at his suffering," he took his way to
the remote valleys of Macedon to write the Bacchae and to die.

G.M.

-

THE TROJAN WOMEN

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

THE GOD POSEIDON.
THE GODDESS PALLAS ATHENA.

HECUBA, Queen of Troy, wife of Priam, mother of Hector and Paris.
CASSANDRA, daughter of Hecuba, a prophetess.
ANDROMACHE, wife of Hector, Prince of Troy.
HELEN, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta; carried off by Paris, Prince of Troy.

TALTHYBIUS, Herald of the Greeks.
MENELAUS, King of Sparta, and, together with his brother Agamemnon, General of the Greeks.

SOLDIERS ATTENDANT ON TALTHYBIUS AND MENELAUS.
CHORUS OF CAPTIVE TROJAN WOMEN, YOUNG AND OLD, MAIDEN AND MARRIED.

The Troades was first acted in the year 415 BC. "The first prize was won by Xenocles,
whoever he may have been, with the four plays Oedipus, Lycaon, Bacchae and Athamas, a
Satyr-play. The second by Euripides with the Alexander, Palamedes, Troades and Sisyphus,
a satyr-play."
-AELIAN, Varia Historia, ii. 8.

-

THE TROJAN WOMEN

The scene represents a battlefield, a few days after the battle. At the back are the walls
of Troy, partially ruined. In front of them, to right and left, are some huts, containing
those of the Captive Women who have been specially set apart for the chief Greek leaders.
At one side some dead bodies of armed men are visible. In front a tall woman with white
hair is lying on the ground asleep.

It is the dusk of early dawn, before sunrise. The figure of the god POSEIDON is dimly
seen before the walls.

POSEIDON.
Up from the Aegean caverns, pool by poo
Of blue salt sea, where feet most beautiful
Of Nereid maidens weave beneath the foam
Their long sea-dances, I, their lord, am come,
Poseidon of the Sea. 'Twas I whose power, 
With great Apollo, builded tower by tower 
These walls of Troy; and still my care doth stand 
True to the ancient People of my hand; 
Which now as smoke is perished, in the shock 
Of Argive spears. Down from Parnassus' rock 
The Greek Epeios came, of Phocian seed, 
And wrought by Pallas' mysteries a Steed 
Marvellous, big with arms; and through my wall 
It passed, a death-fraught image magical.

The groves are empty and the sanctuaries 
Run red with blood. Unburied Priam lies 
By his own hearth, on God's high altar-stair, 
And Phrygian gold goes forth and raiment rare 
To the Argive ships; and weary soldiers roam 
Waiting the wind that blows at last for home, 
For wives and children, left long years away, 
Beyond the seed's tenth fullness and decay, 
To work this land's undoing.

And for me, 
Since Argive Hera conquereth, and she 
Who wrought with Hera to the Phrygians' woe, 
Pallas, behold, I bow mine head and go 
Forth from great Ilion and mine altars old. 
When a still city lieth in the hold 
Of Desolation, all God's spirit there 
Is sick and turns from worship.-Hearken where 
The ancient River waileth with a voice 
Of many women, portioned by the choice 
Of war amid new lords, as the lots leap 
For Thessaly, or Argos, or the steep 
Of Theseus' Rock. And others yet there are, 
High women, chosen from the waste of war 
For the great kings, behind these portals hid; 
And with them that Laconian Tyndarid, 
Helen, like them a prisoner and a prize.

And this unhappy one-would any eyes
Gaze now on Hecuba? Here at the Gates
She lies 'mid many tears for many fates
Of wrong. One child beside Achilles' grave
In secret slain, Polyxena the brave,
Lies bleeding. Priam and his sons are gone;
And, lo, Cassandra, she the Chosen One,
Whom Lord Apollo spared to walk her way 
A swift and virgin spirit, on this day 
Lust hath her, and she goeth garlanded 
A bride of wrath to Agamemnon's bed.

[He turns to go; and another divine Presence
becomes visible in the dusk. It is goddess 
PALLAS ATHENA.

O happy long ago, farewell, farewell, 
Ye shining towers and mine old citadel; 
Broken by Pallas, Child of God, or still 
Thy roots had held thee true.

PALLAS.
Is it the will 
Of God's high Brother, to whose hand is given 
Great power of old, and worship of all Heaven, 
To suffer speech from one whose enmities 
This day are cast aside?

POSEIDON.
His will it is: 
Kindred and long companionship withal, 
Most high Athena, are things magical.

PALLAS. 
Blest be thy gentle mood!-Methinks I see 
A road of comfort here, for thee and me.

POSEIDON. 
Thou hast some counsel of the Gods, or word 
Spoken of Zeus? Or is it tidings heard 
From some far Spirit?

PALLAS.
For this Ilion's sake, 
Whereon we tread, I seek thee, and would make 
My hand as thine.

POSEIDON.
Hath that old hate and deep 
Failed, where she lieth in her ashen sleep? 
Thou pitiest her?

PALLAS.
Speak first; wilt thou be one 
In heart with me and hand till all be done?

POSEIDON.
Yea; but lay bare thy heart. For this land's sake
Thou comest, not for Hellas?

PALLAS.
I would make 
Mine ancient enemies laugh for joy, and bring 
On these Greek ships a bitter homecoming.

POSEIDON. 
Swift is thy spirit's path, and strange withal, 
And hot thy love and hate, where'er they fall.

PALLAS. 
A deadly wrong they did me, yea within 
Mine holy place: thou knowest?

POSEIDON.
I know the sin
Of Ajax, when he cast Cassandra down . . .

PALLAS.
And no man rose and smote him; not a frown 
Nor word from all the Greeks!

POSEIDON.
And 'twas thine hand
That gave them Troy!

PALLAS.
Therefore with thee I stand
To smite them.

POSEIDON.
All thou cravest, even now
Is ready in mine heart. What seekest thou?

PALLAS.
An homecoming that striveth ever more
And cometh to no home.

POSEIDON.
Here on the shore
Wouldst hold them or amid mine own salt foam ?

PALLAS.
When the last ship hath bared her sail for home!
Zeus shall send rain, long rain and flaw of driven
Hail, and a whirling darkness blown from heaven;
To me his levin-light he promiseth 
O'er ships and men, for scourging and hot death 
Do thou make wild the roads of the sea, and steep 
With war of waves and yawning of the deep, 
Till dead men choke Euboea's curling bay. 
So Greece shall dread even in an after day 
My house, nor scorn the Watchers of strange lands!

POSEIDON.
I give thy boon unbartered. These mine hands
Shall stir the waste Aegean; reefs that cross
The Delian pathways, jag-torn Myconos,
Scyros and Lemnos, yea, and storm-driven
Caphereus with the bones of drowned men
Shall glut him.-Go thy ways, and bid the Sire
Yield to shine hand the arrows of his fire
Then wait thine hour, when the last ship shall wind
Her cable coil for home!		[Exit PALLAS.

How are ye blind
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!

[Exit POSEIDON.

_________________

The day slowly dawns: HECUBA wakes.

HECUBA.
Up from the earth, O weary head!
This is not Troy, about, aboveŃ
Not Troy, nor we the lords thereof.
Thou breaking neck, be strengthened!

Endure and chafe not. The winds rave
And falter. Down the world's wide road,
Float, float where streams the breath of God; 
Nor turn thy prow to breast the wave.

Ah woe! . . . For what woe lacketh here?
My children lost, my land, my lord.
O thou great wealth of glory, stored
Of old in Ilion, year by year

We watched . . . and wert thou nothingness?
What is there that I fear to say?
And yet, what help? . . . Ah, well-a-day,
This ache of lying, comfortless

And haunted! Ah, my side, my brow
And temples! All with changeful pain
My body rocketh, and would fain 
Move to the tune of tears that flow: 
For tears are music too, and keep 
A song unheard in hearts that weep.

[She rises and gazes towards the Greek ships
far off on the shore.

O ships, O crowding faces
Of ships, O hurrying beat
Of oars as of crawling feet,
How found ye our holy places?
Threading the narrows through,
Out from the gulfs of the Greek, 
Out to the clear dark blue,
With hate ye came and with joy, 
And the noise of your music flew,
Clarion and pipe did shriek,
As the coiled cords ye threw,
Held in the heart of Troy!

What sought ye then that ye came?
A woman, a thing abhorred:
A King's wife that her lord
Hateth: and Castor's shame
Is hot for her sake, and the reeds
Of old Eurotas stir
With the noise of the name of her.
She slew mine ancient King,
The Sower of fifty Seeds,
And cast forth mine and me,
As shipwrecked men, that cling
To a reef in an empty sea.

Who am I that I sit
Here at a Greek king's door,
Yea, in the dust of it?
A slave that men drive before,
A woman that hath no home,
Weeping alone for her dead;
A low and bruised head,
And the glory struck therefrom.

[She starts up from her solitary brooding, 
and calls to the other Trojan Women in the 
huts.

O Mothers of the Brazen Spear,
And maidens, maidens, brides of shame.
Troy is a smoke, a dying flame;
Together we will weep for her:
I call ye as a wide-wing'd bird
Calleth the children of her fold,
To cry, ah, not the cry men heard
In Ilion, not the songs of old,
That echoed when my hand was true
On Priam's sceptre, and my feet
Touched on the stone one signal beat,
And out the Dardan music rolled;
And Troy's great Gods gave ear thereto.

[The door of one of the huts on the right 
opens, and the Women steal out severally, 
startled and afraid.

FIRST WOMAN. 	
[Strothe I
How say'st thou ? Whither moves thy cry,
Thy bitter cry? Behind our door
We heard thy heavy heart outpour 
Its sorrow: and there shivered by
Fear and a quick sob shaken
From prisoned hearts that shall be free no more! 

HECUBA.
Child, 'tis the ships that stir upon the shore . . 

SECOND WOMAN.
The ships, the ships awaken! 

THIRD WOMAN.
Dear God, what would they? Overseas 
Bear me afar to strange cities?

HECUBA
Nay, child, I know not. Dreams are these,
Fears of the hope-forsaken.

FIRST WOMAN.
Awake, O daughters of affliction, wake 
And learn your lots! Even now the Argives break 
Their camp for sailing!

HECUBA.
Ah, not Cassandra! Wake not her
Whom God hath maddened, lest the foe
Mock at her dreaming. Leave me clear
From that one edge of woe.
O Troy, my Troy, thou diest here
Most lonely; and most lonely we
The living wander forth from thee,
And the dead leave thee wailing!

[One of the huts on the left is now open,
and the rest of the CHORUS come out severally. 
Their number eventually amounts to fifteen.

FOURTH WOMAN.
[Antistrophe I.
Out of the tent of the Greek king
I steal, my Queen, with trembling breath:
What means thy call ? Not death; not death!
They would not slay so low a thing!

FIFTH WOMAN.
O, 'tis the ship-folk crying
To deck the galleys: and we part, we part!

HECUBA.
Nay, daughter: take the morning to thine heart.

FIFTH WOMAN.
My heart with dread is dying!

SIXTH WOMAN.
An herald from the Greek hath come!

FIFTH WOMAN.
How have they cast me, and to whom
A bondmaid?

HECUBA. 
Peace, child: wait thy doom.
Our lots are near the trying.

FOURTH WOMAN.
Argos, belike, or Phthia shall it be, 
Or some lone island of the tossing sea, 
Far, far from Troy?

HECUBA.
And I the aged, where go I,
A winter-frozen bee, a slave
Death-shapen, as the stones that lie
Hewn on a dead man's grave:
The children of mine enemy
To foster, or keep watch before
The threshold of a master's door, 
I that was Queen in Troy!

A WOMAN TO ANOTHER.
[Strophe 2.
And thou, what tears can tell thy doom?

THE OTHER.
The shuttle still shall flit and change 
Beneath my fingers, but the loom, 
Sister, be strange.

ANOTHER (wildly).
Look, my dead child! My child, my love,
The last look....

ANOTHER.
Oh, there cometh worse.
A Greek's bed in the dark....

ANOTHER.
God curse
That night and all the powers thereof!

ANOTHER.
Or pitchers to and fro to bear
To some Pirene on the hill,
Where the proud water craveth still 
Its broken-hearted minister.

ANOTHER.
God guide me yet to Theseus' land,
The gentle land, the famed afar . . .

ANOTHER.
But not the hungry foam -Ah, never!-
Of fierce Eurotas, Helen's river, 
To bow to Menelaus' hand,
That wasted Troy with war!

A WOMAN.
[Antistrophe 2. 
They told us of a land high-born,
Where glimmers round Olympus' roots 
A lordly river, red with corn
And burdened fruits.

ANOTHER.
Aye, that were next in my desire
To Athens, where good spirits dwell . . .

ANOTHER.
Or Aetna's breast, the deeps of fire
That front the Tyrian's Citadel: 
First mother, she, of Sicily
And mighty mountains: fame hath to
Their crowns of goodness manifold. . .

ANOTHER.
And, close beyond the narrowing sea, 
A sister land, where float enchanted
Ionian summits, wave on wave,
And Crathis of the burning tresses 
Makes red the happy vale, and blesses 
With gold of fountains spirit-haunted
Homes of true men and brave!

LEADER.
But lo, who cometh: and his lips
Grave with the weight of dooms unknown: 
A Herald from the Grecian ships.
Swift comes he, hot-foot to be done 
And finished. Ah, what bringeth he 
Of news or judgment? Slaves are we,
Spoils that the Greek hath won!

[TALTHYBlUS, followed by some Soldiers, enters 
from the left.

TALTHYBIUS.
Thou know'st me, Hecuba. Often have I crossed 
Thy plain with tidings from the Hellene host. 
'Tis I, Talthybius. . . . Nay, of ancient use 
Thou know'st me. And I come to bear thee news.

HECUBA.
Ah me, 'tis here, 'tis here, 
Women of Troy, our long embosomed fear!

TALTHYBIUS.
The lots are cast, if that it was ye feared.

HECUBA.
What lord, what land.... Ah me, 
Phthia or Thebes, or sea-worn Thessaly?

TALTHYBIUS.
Each hath her own. Ye go not in one herd.

HECUBA.
Say then what lot hath any? What of joy
Falls, or can fall on any child of Troy?

TALTHYBIUS.
I know: but make thy questions severally.

HECUBA.
My stricken one must be
Still first. Say how Cassandra's portion lies.

TALTHYBIUS.
Chosen from all for Agamemnon's prize!

HECUBA.
How, for his Spartan bride
A tirewoman? For Helen's sister's pride?

TALTHYBIUS.
Nay, nay: a bride herself, for the King's bed.

HECUBA.
The sainted of Apollo? And her own
Prize that God promised
Out of the golden clouds, her virgin crown ?

TALTHYBIUS
He loved her for that same strange holiness.

HECUBA.
Daughter, away, away,
Cast all away,
The haunted Keys, the lonely stole's array
That kept thy body like a sacred place!

TALTHYBIUS.
Is't not rare fortune that the King hath smiled
On such a maid ?

HECUBA.
What of that other child
Ye reft from me but now?

TALTHYBIUS (speaking with some constraint).
Polyxena? Or what child meanest thou?

HECUBA.
The same. What man now hath her, or what doom?

TALTHYBIUS.
She rests apart, to watch Achilles' tomb.

HECUBA.
To watch a tomb? My daughter? What is this? ...
Speak, Friend? What fashion of the laws of Greece?

TALTHYBIUS.
Count thy maid happy! She hath naught of ill
To fear . . .

HECUBA.
What meanest thou ? She liveth still ?

TALTHYBIUS.
I mean, she hath one toil that holds her free 
From all toil else.

HECUBA.
What of Andromache, 
Wife of mine iron-hearted Hector, where 
Journeyeth she?

TALTHYBIUS.
Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, hath taken her.

HECUBA.
And I, whose slave am I, 
The shaken head, the arm that creepeth by, 
Staff-crutched, like to fall?

TALTHYBIUS. 
Odysseus, Ithaca's king, hath thee for thrall.

HECUBA.
Beat, beat the crownless head: 
Rend the cheek till the tears run red! 
A lying man and a pitiless 
Shalt be lord of me, a heart full-flown 
With scorn of righteousness: 
O heart of a beast where law is none, 
Where all things change so that lust be fed, 
The oath and the deed, the right and the wrong, 
Even the hate of the forked tongue: 
Even the hate turns and is cold, 
False as the love that was false of old!

O Women of Troy, weep for me! 
Yea, I am gone: I am gone my ways. 
Mine is the crown of misery, 
The bitterest day of all our days.

LEADER.
Thy fate thou knowest, Queen: but I know not
What lord of South or North has won my lot.

TALTHYBIUS.
Go, seek Cassandra, men! Make your best speed, 
That I may leave her with the King, and lead 
These others to their divers lords. . . . Ha, there! 
What means that sudden light? Is it the flare 
Of torches?

[Light is seen shining through the crevices of the 
second hut on the right. He moves towards it.

Would they fire their prison rooms, 
Or how, these dames of Troy?-'Fore God, the dooms 
Are known, and now they burn themselves and die 
Rather than sail with us! How savagely 
In days like these a free neck chafes beneath 
Its burden! . . . Open! Open quick! Such death 
Were bliss to them, it may be: but 'twill bring 
Much wrath, and leave me shamed before the King!

HECUBA.
There is no fire, no peril: 'tis my child, 
Cassandra, by the breath of God made wild.

[The door opens from within and CASSANDRA
enters, white-robed and wreathed like a 
Priestess, a great torch in her hand. She 
is singing softly to herself and does not see 
the Herald or the scene before her. 

CASSANDRA.
Lift, lift it high:        [Strophe.
Give it to mine hand!
Lo, I bear a flame 
Unto God! I praise his name. 
I light with a burning brand
This sanctuary.

Blessed is he that shall wed, 
And blessed, blessed am I 
In Argos: a bride to lie
With a king in a king's bed.

Hail, O Hymen red,
O Torch that makest one!
Weepest thou, Mother mine own?
Surely thy cheek is pale
With tears, tears that wail
For a land and a father dead.
But I go garlanded:
I am the Bride of Desire:
Therefore my torch is borne--
Lo, the lifting of morn,
Lo, the leaping of fire!--

For thee, O Hymen bright, 
For thee, O Moon of the Deep,
So Law hath charged, for the light
Of a maid's last sleep.

Awake, O my feet, awake:       [Antistrophe.
Our father's hope is won! 
Dance as the dancing skies 
Over him, where he lies 
Happy beneath the sun! . . .
Lo, the Ring that I make . . .

[She makes a circle round her with a torch, 
and visions appear to her.

Apollo! . . . Ah, is it thou?
O shrine in the laurels cold, 
I bear thee still, as of old,
Mine incense! Be near to me now.

[She waves the torch as though bearing incence,

O Hymen, Hymen fleet:
Quick torch that makest one!
How? Am I still alone?
Laugh as I laugh, and twine
In the dance, O Mother mine:
Dear feet, be near my feet!

Come, greet ye Hymen, greet
Hymen with songs of pride:
Sing to him loud and long, 
Cry, cry, when the song
Faileth, for joy of the bride!

O Damsels girt in the gold 
Of Ilion, cry, cry ye, 
For him that is doomed of old
To be lord of me!

LEADER.
O hold the damsel, lest her tranced feet 
Lift her afar, Queen, toward the Hellene fleet!

HECUBA.
O Fire, Fire, where men make marriages 
Surely thou hast thy lot; but what are these 
Thou bringest flashing? Torches savage-wild 
And far from mine old dreams.--Alas, my child, 
How little dreamed I then of wars or red 
Spears of the Greek to lay thy bridal bed! 
Give me thy brand; it hath no holy blaze 
Thus in thy frenzy flung. Nor all thy days 
Nor all thy griefs have changed them yet, nor learned 
Wisdom.--Ye women, bear the pine half burned
To the chamber back; let your drowned eyes 
Answer the music of these bridal cries!

[She takes the torch and gives it to one of the women.

CASSANDRA.
O Mother, fill mine hair with happy flowers, 
And speed me forth. Yea, if my spirit cowers, 
Drive me with wrath! So liveth Loxias, 
A bloodier bride than ever Helen was 
Go I to Agamemnon, Lord most high 
Of Hellas! . . . I shall kill him, mother; I 
Shall kill him, and lay waste his house with fire 
As he laid ours. My brethren and my sire 
Shall win again . . . 
(Checking herself) But part I must let be, 
And speak not. Not the axe that craveth me, 
And more than me; not the dark wanderings 
Of mother-murder that my bridal brings, 
And all the House of Atreus down, down, down . . .

Nay, I will show thee. Even now this town 
Is happier than the Greeks. I know the power 
Of God is on me: but this little hour, 
Wilt thou but listen, I will hold him back!
One love, one woman's beauty, o'er the track 
Of hunted Helen, made their myriads fall. 
And this their King so wise, who ruleth all, 
What wrought he? Cast out Love that Hate might feed: 
Gave to his brother his own child, his seed
Of gladness, that a woman fled, and fain 
To fly for ever, should be turned again!
So the days waned, and armies on the shore 
Of Simois stood and strove and died. Wherefore? 
No man had moved their landmarks; none had shook 
Their walled towns.--And they whom Ares took, 
Had never seen their children: no wife came 
With gentle arms to shroud the limbs of them 
For burial, in a strange and angry earth 
Laid dead. And there at home, the same long dearth: 
Women that lonely died, and aged men 
Waiting for sons that ne'er should turn again, 
Nor know their graves, nor pour drink-offerings, 
To still the unslaked dust. These be the things 
The conquering Greek hath won!
	But we--what pride, 
What praise of men were sweeter?--fighting died 
To save our people. And when war was red 
Around us, friends upbore the gentle dead 
Home, and dear women's heads about them wound 
White shrouds, and here they sleep in the old ground 
Beloved. And the rest long days fought on, 
Dwelling with wives and children, not alone 
And joyless, like these Greeks.
	And Hector's woe, 
What is it? He is gone, and all men know 
His glory, and how true a heart he bore. 
It is the gift the Greek hath brought! Of yore 
Men saw him not, nor knew him. Yea, and even 
Paris hath loved withal a child of heaven:
Else had his love but been as others are.
Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war! 
Yet if war come, there is a crown in death 
For her that striveth well and perisheth 
Unstained: to die in evil were the stain! 
Therefore, O Mother, pity not thy slain, 
Nor Troy, nor me, the bride. Thy direst foe 
And mine by this my wooing is brought low.


TALTHYBIUS (at last breaking through the spell that has held him).
I swear, had not Apollo made thee mad, 
Not lightly hadst thou flung this shower of bad 
Bodings, to speed my General o'er the seas!
'Fore God, the wisdoms and the greatnesses 
Of seeming, are they hollow all, as things 
Of naught? This son of Atreus, of all kings 
Most mighty, hath so bowed him to the love 
Of this mad maid, and chooseth her above 
All women! By the Gods, rude though I be, 
I would not touch her hand!
	Look thou; I see 
Thy lips are blind, and whatso words they speak, 
Praises of Troy or shamings of the Greek, 
I cast to the four winds! Walk at my side 
In peace! . . . And heaven content him of his bride!

[He moves as though to go, but turns to HECUBA, 
and speaks more gently. 

And thou shalt follow to Odysseus' host 
When the word comes. 'Tis a wise queen thou go'st 
To serve, and gentle: so the Ithacans say.

CASSANDRA (seeing for the first time the Herald and all the scene).
How fierce a slave O Heralds, Heralds! Yea,
Voices of Death; and mists are over them 
Of dead men's anguish, like a diadem, 
These weak abhorred things that serve the hate 
Of kings and peoples! . . .
	To Odysseus' gate
My mother goeth, say'st thou? Is God's word 
As naught, to me in silence ministered, 
That in this place she dies? . . . (To herself) No 
	more; no more! 
Why should I speak the shame of them, before 
They come? . . . Little he knows, that hard-beset 
Spirit, what deeps of woe await him yet; 
Till all these tears of ours and harrowings 
Of Troy, by his, shall be as golden things. 
Ten years behind ten years athwart his way 
Waiting: and home, lost and unfriended . . .
	Nay :
Why should Odesseus' labours vex my breath ? 
On; hasten; guide me to the house of Death, 
To lie beside my bridegroom! . . .
	Thou Greek King, 
Who deem'st thy fortune now so high a thing, 
Thou dust of the earth, a lowlier bed I see, 
In darkness, not in light, awaiting thee: 
And with thee, with thee . . . there, where yawneth plain 
A rift of the hills, raging with winter rain,
Dead . . . and out-cast . . . and naked . . . It is I
Beside my bridegroom: and the wild beasts cry,
And ravin on God's chosen!

[She clasps her hands to her brow and feels the
wreaths.

	O, ye wreaths!
Ye garlands of my God, whose love yet breathes
About me; shapes of joyance mystical;
Begone! I have forgot the festival,
Forgot the joy. Begone! I tear ye, so,
From off me! . . . Out on the swift winds they go.
With flesh still clean I give them back to thee,
Still white, O God, O light that leadest me!
	[Turning upon the Herald.
Where lies the galley? Whither shall I tread?
See that your watch be set, your sail be spread.
The wind comes quick! . . . Three Powers--marks me thou!--
There be in Hell, and one walks with thee now!
Mother, farewell, and weep not! O my sweet
City, my earth-clad brethren, and thou great
Sire that begat us; but a space, ye Dead,
And I am with you: yea, with crowned head
I come, and shining from the fires that feed
On these that slay us now, and all their seed!

	[She goes out, followed by TALTHYBIUS and the
	Soldiers; HECUBA, after waiting for an
	instant motionless, falls to the ground.

LEADER OF CHORUS
The Queen, ye Watchers! See, she falls, she falls,
Rigid without a word! O sorry thralls,
Too late! And will ye leave her downstricken,
A woman, and so old? Raise her again!

	[Some women go to HECUBA, but she refuses
	their aid and speaks without rising.

HECUBA
Let lie . . . the love we seek not is no love . . .
This ruined body! Is the fall thereof
Too deep for all that now is over me
Of anguish, and hath been, and yet shall be?
Ye Gods . . . Alas! Why call on things so weak
For aid? Yet there is something that doth seek,
Crying, for God, when one of us hath woe.
O, I will think of things gone long ago
And weave them to a song, like one more tear
In the heart of misery. . . . All kings we were;
And I must wed a king. And sons I brought
My lord King, many sons . . . nay, that were naught;
But high strong princes, of all Troy the best.
Hellas nor Troas nor the garnered East
Held such a mother! And all these things beneath
The Argive spear I saw cast down in death,
And shore these tresses at the dead men's feet.
	Yea, and the gardener of my garden great,
It was not any noise of him nor tale
I wept for; these eyes saw him, when the pale
Was broke, and there at the altar Priam fell
Murdered, and round him all his citadel
Sacked. And my daughters, virgins of the fold,
Meet to be brides of mighty kings, behold,
'Twas for the Greek I bred them! All are gone;
And no hope left, that I shall look upon
Their faces any more, nor they on mine.
	And now my feet tread on the utmost line: 
An old, old slave-woman, I pass below 
Mine enemies' gates; and whatso task they know 
For this age basest, shall be mine; the door, 
Bowing, to shut and open. . . . I that bore 
Hector! . . . and meal to grind, and this racked head 
Bend to the stones after a royal bed; 
Torn rags about me, aye, and under them 
Torn flesh; 'twill make a woman sick for shame! 
Woe's me; and all that one man's arms might hold 
One woman, what long seas have o'er me rolled 
And roll for ever! O my child, whose white 
Soul laughed amid the laughter of God's light,
Cassandra, what hands and how strange a day 
Have loosed thy zone! And thou, Polyxena, 
Where art thou? And my sons? Not any seed 
Of man nor woman now shall help my need. 
	Why raise me any more? What hope have I 
To hold me? Take this slave that once trod high 
In Ilion; cast her on her bed of clay 
Rock-pillowed, to lie down, and pass away 
Wasted with tears. And whatso man they call 
Happy, believe not ere the last day fall!

___________________


Chorus.  		    [Strophe.

O Muse, be near me now, and make 
A strange song for Ilion's sake, 
Till a tone of tears be about mine ears 
And out of my lips a music break 
For Troy, Troy, and the end of the years:
When the wheels of the Greek above me pressed, 
And the mighty horse-hoofs beat my breast; 
And all around were the Argive spears
A towering Steed of golden rein-
O gold without, dark steel within!-
Ramped in our gates; and all the plain
Lay silent where the Greeks had been. 
And a cry broke from all the folk 
Gathered above on Ilion's rock:
"Up, up, O fear is over now!
To Pallas, who hath saved us living, 
To Pallas bear this victory-vow!" 
Then rose the old man from his room, 
The merry damsel left her loom, 
And each bound death about his brow
With minstrelsy and high thanksgiving!
						[Antistrophe. 
O, swift were all in Troy that day, 
And girt them to the portal-way,
Marvelling at that mountain Thing 
Smooth-carven, where the Argives lay, 
And wrath, and Ilion's vanquishing:
Meet gift for her that spareth not,
Heaven's yokeless Rider. Up they brought 
Through the steep gates her offering: 
Like some dark ship that climbs the shore
On straining cables, up, where stood 
Her marble throne, her hallowed floor,
Who lusted for her people's blood.

A very weariness of joy 
Fell with the evening over Troy: 
And lutes of Afric mingled there
With Phrygian songs: and many a maiden, 
With white feet glancing light as air,
Made happy music through the gloom: 
And fires on many an inward room 
All night broad-flashing, flung their glare
On laughing eyes and slumber-laden.


A MAIDEN.
I was among the dancers there
To Artemis, and glorying sang 
Her of the Hills, the Maid most fair,
Daughter of Zeus: and, lo, there rang 
A shout out of the dark, and fell
Deathlike from street to street, and made 
A silence in the citadel:
And a child cried, as if afraid, 
And hid him in his mother's veil.
Then stalked the Slayer from his den,
The hand of Pallas served her well!
O blood, blood of Troy was deep
About the streets and altars then: 
And in the wedded rooms of sleep,
Lo, the desolate dark alone,
And headless things, men stumbled on.

And forth, lo, the women go, 
The crown of War, the crown of Woe, 
To bear the children of the foe
And weep, weep, for Ilion!
___________________

[As the song ceases a chariot is seen approaching 
	from the town, laden with spoils. On it 
	sits a mourning Woman with a child in 
	her arms.


LEADER.
Lo, yonder on the heaped crest
Of a Greek wain, Andromache,
As one that o'er an unknown sea
Tosseth; and on her wave-borne breast 
Her loved one clingeth, Hector's child,
	Astyanax . . . O most forlorn
	Of women, whither go'st thou, borne
'Mid Hector's bronzen arms, and piled 
Spoils of the dead, and pageantry
	Of them that hunted Ilion down?
	Aye, richy thy new lord shall crown
The mountain shrines of Thessaly!


ANDROMACHE. 			[Strophe I.
Forth to the Greek I go, 
Driven as a beast is driven. 

HEC. Woe, woe! 

AND. 	Nay, mine is woe:
Woe to none other given, 
And the song and the crown therefor!

HEC. O Zeus!

AND. He hates thee sore!

HEC. Children!

AND. 	No more, no more 
To aid thee: their strife is striven! 

HECUBA. 			[Antistrophe I. 
Troy, Troy is gone! 

AND. Yea, and her treasure parted. 

HEC. Gone, gone, mine own 
	Children, the noble-hearted!

AND. Sing sorrow. . . .

HEC. 	 For me, for me!

AND. Sing for the Great City, 
That falleth, falleth to be
A shadow, a fire departed.


ANDROMACHE.
						[Strophe 2.
Come to me, O my lover!

HEC. The dark shroudeth him over,
My flesh, woman, not thine, not thine!

AND. Make of thine arms my cover!


HECUBA.
						[Antistrophe 2. 
O thou whose wound was deepest, 
Thou that my children keepest,
Priam, Priam, O age-worn King, 
Gather me where thou sleepest.


ANDROMACHE (her hands upon her heart).
						[Strophe 3. 
O here is the deep of desire,

HEC. (How? And is this not woe?)

AND. For a city burned with fire;

HEC.  (It beateth, blow on blow.)

AND. God's wrath for Paris, thy son, that he died not 
	long ago:

Who sold for his evil love
Troy and the towers thereof: 
Therefore the dead men lie 
Naked, beneath the eye
Of Pallas, and vultures croak 
And flap for joy: 
So Love hath laid his yoke
On the neck of Troy!


HECUBA. 				[Antistrophe 3.
O mine own land, my home, 

AND. (I weep for thee, left forlorn,) 

HEC. See'st thou what end is come? 

AND. (And the house where my babes were born.) 

HEC. A desolate Mother we leave, O children, a City 
		of scorn: 

Even as the sound of a song 
Left by the way, but long 
Remembered, a tune of tears 
Falling where no man hears, 
In the old house, as rain, 
For things loved of yore: 
But the dead hath lost his pain 
And weeps no more.


LEADER.
How sweet are tears to them in bitter stress,
And sorrow, and all the songs of heaviness.


ANDROMACHE.
Mother of him of old, whose mighty spear
Smote Greeks like chaff, see'st thou what things are here?


HECUBA.
I see God's hand, that buildeth a great crown
For littleness, and hath cast the mighty down.


ANDROMACHE.
I and my babe are driven among the droves 
Of plundered cattle. O, when fortune moves 
So swift, the high heart like a slave beats low.


HECUBA.
'Tis fearful to be helpless. Men but now 
Have taken Cassandra, and I strove in vain.


ANDROMACHE.
Ah, woe is me; hath Ajax come again? 
But other evil yet is at thy gate.


HECUBA.
Nay, Daughter, beyond number, beyond weight 
My evils are! Doom raceth against doom.


ANDROMACHE.
Polyxena across Achilles' tomb 
Lies slain, a gift flung to the dreamless dead.


HECUBA.
My sorrow! . . . 'Tis but what Talthybius said: 
So plain a riddle, and I read it not.


ANDROMACHE.
I saw her lie, and stayed this chariot; 
And raiment wrapt on her dead limbs, and beat 
My breast for her.


HECUBA (to herself).
	O the foul sin of it! 
The wickedness! My child. My child! Again 
I cry to thee. How cruelly art thou slain!


ANDROMACHE.
She hath died her death, and howso dark it be, 
Her death is sweeter than my misery.


HECUBA.
Death cannot be what Life is, Child; the cup 
Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope.


ANDROMACHE.
O Mother, having ears, hear thou this word 
Fear-conquering, till thy heart as mine be stirred 
With joy. To die is only not to be; 
And better to be dead than grievously 
Living. They have no pain, they ponder not 
Their own wrong. But the living that is brought 
From joy to heaviness, his soul doth roam, 
As in a desert, lost, from its old home. 
Thy daughter lieth now as one unborn, 
Dead, and naught knowing of the lust and scorn 
That slew her. And I . . . long since I drew my bow 
Straight at the heart of good fame; and I know 
My shaft hit; and for that am I the more 
Fallen from peace. All that men praise us for, 
I loved for Hector's sake, and sought to win. 
I knew that alway, be there hurt therein 
Or utter innocence, to team abroad 
Hath ill report for women; so I trod 
Down the desire thereof, and walked my way 
In mine own garden. And light words and gay
Parley of women never passed my door. 
The thoughts of mine own heart . . . I craved no 
	more . . . 
Spoke with me, and I was happy. Constantly 
I brought fair silence and a tranquil eye 
For Hector's greeting, and watched well the way 
Of living, where to guide and where obey.
	And, lo! some rumour of this peace, being gone 
Forth to the Greek, hath cursed me. Achilles' son, 
So soon as I was taken, for his thrall 
Chose me. I shall do service in the hall 
Of them that slew . . . How? Shall I thrust aside 
Hector's beloved face, and open wide 
My heart to this new lord? Oh, I should stand 
A traitor to the dead! And if my hand 
And flesh shrink from him . . . lo, wrath and despite 
O'er all the house, and I a slave!
			One night, 
One night . . . aye, men have said it . . . maketh tame
A woman in a man's arms. . . . O shame, shame! 
What woman's lips can so forswear her dead, 
And give strange kisses in another's bed? 
Why, not a dumb beast, not a colt will run 
In the yoke untroubled, when her mate is gone--
A thing not in God's image, dull, unmoved 
Of reason. O my Hector! best beloved, 
That, being mine, wast all in all to me, 
My prince, my wise one, O my majesty 
Of valiance! No man's touch had ever come 
Near me, when thou from out my father's home 
Didst lead me and make me thine. . . . And thou art 
			dead, 
And I war-flung to slavery and the bread
Of shame in Hellas, over bitter seas!
What knoweth she of evils like to these,
That dead Polyxena, thou weepest for? 
There liveth not in my life any more 
The hope that others have. Nor will I tell 
The lie to mine own heart, that aught is well 
Or shall be well. . . . Yet, O, to dream were sweet!


LEADER.
Thy feet have trod the pathway of my feet, 
And thy clear sorrow teacheth me mine own.


HECUBA. 
Lo, yonder ships: I ne'er set foot on one, 
But tales and pictures tell, when over them 
Breaketh a storm not all too strong to stem, 
Each man strives hard, the tiller gripped, the mast 
Manned, the hull baled, to face it: till at last 
Too strong breaks the o'erwhelming sea: to, then 
They cease, and yield them up is broken men 
To fate and the wild waters. Even so 
I in my many sorrows bear me low, 
Nor curse, nor strive that other things may be. 
The great wave rolled from God hath conquered me. 
But, O, let Hector and the fates that fell 
On Hector, sleep. Weep for him ne'er so well, 
Thy weeping shall not wake him. Honour thou 
The new lord that is set above thee now, 
And make of thine own gentle piety 
A prize to lure his heart. So shalt thou be 
A strength to them that love us, and--God knows, 
It may be--rear this babe among his foes,
My Hector's child, to manhood and great aid 
For Ilion. So her stones may yet be laid 
One on another, if God will, and wrought
Again to a city! Ah, how thought to thought 
Still beckons! . . . But what minion of the Greek 
Is this that cometh, with new words to speak?

[Enter TALTHYBIUS with a band of Soldiers. 
	He comes forward slowly and with evident 
	disquiet.


TALTHYBIUS.
Spouse of the noblest heart that beat in Troy, 
Andromache, hate me not! 'Tis not in joy 
I tell thee. But the people and the Kings 
Have with one voice . . .


ANDROMACHE.
	What is it? Evil things 
Are on thy lips!


TALTHYBIUS.
	'Tis ordered, this child . . . 
Oh, How can I tell her of it?


ANDROMACHE.
	Doth he not go 
With me, to the same master?


TALTHYBIUS.
	There is none 
In Greece, shall e'er be master of thy son.


ANDROMACHE.
How? Will they leave him here to build again 
The wreck? . . .

TALTHYBIUS.
I know not how to tell thee plain!


ANDROMACHE.
Thou hast a gentle heart . . . if it be ill, 
And not good, news thou hidest!


TALTHYBIUS.
	'Tis their will 
Thy son shall die. . . . The whole vile thing is said 
Now!


ANDROMACHE.
Oh, I could have borne mine enemy's bed!


TALTHYBIUS.
And speaking in the council of the host 
Odysseus hath prevailed-


ANDROMACHE.
	O lost! lost! lost! . . . 
Forgive me! It is not easy . . .


TALTHYBIUS.
	. . . That the son 
Of one so perilous be not fostered on
To manhood-


ANDROMACHE.
	God; may his own counsel fall
On his own sons!


TALTHYBIUS.
. . . But from this crested wall 
Of Troy be dashed, and die. . . . Nay, let the thing 
Be done. Thou shalt be wiser so. Nor cling 
So fiercely to him. Suffer as a brave 
Woman in bitter pain; nor think to have 
Strength which thou hast not. Look about thee here! 
Canst thou see help, or refuge anywhere? 
Thy land is fallen and thy lord, and thou 
A prisoner and alone, one woman; how 
Canst battle against us? For thine own good 
I would not have thee strive, nor make ill blood 
And shame about thee. . . . Ah, nor move thy lips 
In silence there, to cast upon the ships 
Thy curse! One word of evil to the host, 
This babe shall have no burial, but be tossed 
Naked. . . . Ah, peace! And bear as best thou may, 
War's fortune. So thou shalt not go thy way 
Leaving this child unburied; nor the Greek 
Be stern against thee, if thy heart be meek!


ANDROMACHE (to the child).
Go, die, my best-beloved, my cherished one, 
In fierce men's hands, leaving me here alone. 
Thy father was too valiant; that is why 
They slay thee! Other children, like to die, 
Might have been spared for that. But on thy head 
His good is turned to evil.
	O thou bed 
And bridal; O the joining of the hand, 
That led me long ago to Hector's land
To bear, O not a lamb for Grecian swords 
To slaughter, but a Prince o'er all the hordes 
Enthroned of wide-flung Asia. . . . Weepest thou? 
Nay, why, my little one? Thou canst not know. 
And Father will not come; he will not come; 
Not once, the great spear flashing, and the tomb 
Riven to set thee free! Not one of all 
His brethren, nor the might of Ilion's wall.
How shall it be? One horrible spring . . . deep, deep 
Down. And thy neck . . . Ah God, so cometh sleep! . . . 
And none to pity thee! . . . Thou little thing 
That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling 
All round thy neck! Beloved; can it be 
All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee 
And fostered; all the weary nights, wherethrough 
I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew 
Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time; 
Not ever again. Put up thine arms, and climb 
About my neck: now, kiss me, lips to lips. . . .
	O, ye have found an anguish that outstrips 
All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks! 
Why will ye slay this innocent, that seeks 
No wrong? . . . O Helen, Helen, thou ill tree 
That Tyndareus planted, who shall deem of thee 
As child of Zeus? O, thou hast drawn thy breath 
From many fathers, Madness, Hate, red Death, 
And every rotting poison of the sky! 
Zeus knows thee not, thou vampire, draining dry. 
Greece and the world! God hate thee and destroy, 
That with those beautiful eyes hast blasted Troy, 
And made the far-famed plains a waste withal.
	Quick! take him: drag him: cast him from the wall, 
If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift! 
God hath undone me, and I cannot lift 
One hand, one hand, to save my child from death . . . 
O, hide my head for shame: fling me beneath 
Your galleys' benches! . . . 
	[She swoons: then half-rising. 
	   Quick: I must begone 
To the bridal. . . . I have lost my child, my own!
	[The Soldiers close round her.


LEADER.
O Troy ill-starred; for one strange woman, one 
Abhorred kiss, how are thine hosts undone!


TALTHYBIUS (bending over ANDROMACHE and gradually 
			taking the Child from her).
Come, Child: let be that clasp of love
Outwearied! Walk thy ways with me,
Up to the crested tower, above
Thy father's wall . . . Where they decree
Thy soul shall perish.--Hold him: hold!--
Would God some other man might ply
These charges, one of duller mould,
And nearer to the iron than I!


HECUBA.
O Child, they rob us of our own,
Child of my Mighty One outworn:
Ours, ours thou art!--Can aught be done 
Of deeds, can aught of pain be borne,
To aid thee?--Lo, this beaten head, 
This bleeding bosom! These I spread
As gifts to thee. I can thus much.
	Woe, woe for Troy, and woe for thee!
What fall yet lacketh, ere we touch
The last dead deep of misery?

[The Child who has started back from TALTHYBIUS, 
	is taken up by one of the Soldiers 
	and borne back towards the city, while 
	ANDROMACHE is set again on the Chariot and 
	driven off towards the ships. TALTHYBIUS 
	goes with the Child.
______________________

CHORUS.
						[Strophe I. 
In Salamis, filled with the foaming
Of billows and murmur of bees,
Old Telamon stayed from his roaming,
Long ago, on a throne of the seas;
Looking out on the hills olive-laden,
Enchanted, where first from the earth
The grey-gleaming fruit of the Maiden
	Athena had birth;
A soft grey crown for a city
Beloved, a City of Light:
Yet he rested not there, nor had pity, 
But went forth in his might, 
Where Heracles wandered, the lonely
Bow-bearer, and lent him his hands
For the wrecking of one land only, 
Of Ilion, Ilion only,
	Most hated of lands!
						[Antistrophe I.
Of the bravest of Hellas he made him
A ship-folk, in wrath for the Steeds,
And sailed the wide waters, and stayed him
At last amid Simois' reeds;
And the oars beat slow in the river,
And the Iong ropes held in the strand,
And he felt for his bow and his quiver, 
	The wrath of his hand.
And the old king died; and the towers
That Phoebus had builded did fall,
And his wrath, as a flame that devours, 
	Ran red over all;
And the fields and the woodlands lay blasted,
Long ago. Yea, twice hath the Sire
Uplifted his hand and downcast it
On the wall of the Dardan, downcast it 
As a sword and as fire.
						[Strophe 2.
In vain, all in vain,
O thou 'mid the wine-jars golden 
	That movest in delicate joy, 
	Ganymedes, child of Troy,
The lips of the Highest drain
	The cup in thine hand upholden:
And thy mother, thy mother that bore thee,
Is wasted with fire and torn; 
	And the voice of her shores is heard, 
	Wild, as the voice of a bird,
For lovers aind children before thee
	Crying, and mothers outworn.
And the pools of thy bathing are perished,
	And the wind-strewn ways of thy feet:
Yet thy face as aforetime is cherished
	Of Zeus, and the breath of it sweet;
Yea, the beauty of Calm is upon it
	In houses at rest and afar.
But thy land, He hath wrecked and o'erthrown it
	In the wailing of war.
						[Antistrophe 2.
O Love, ancient Love,
Of old to the Dardan given; 
	Love of the Lords of the Sky; 
	How didst thou lift us high
In Ilion, yea, and above
	All cities, as wed with heaven!
For Zeus--O leave it unspoken:
But alas for the love of the Morn; 
	Morn of the milk-white wing, 
	The gentle, the earth-loving,
That shineth on battlements broken
	In Troy, and a people forlorn!
And, lo, in her bowers Tithonus,
	Our brother, yet sleeps as of old:
O, she too hath loved us and known us,
	And the Steeds of her star, flashing gold,
Stooped hither and bore him above us;
	Then blessed we the Gods in our joy.
But all that made them to love us 
	Hath perished from Troy.
______________________

[As the song ceases, the King MENELAUS enters, 
	richly armed and followed by a bodyguard 
	of Soldiers. He is a prey to violent and 
	conflicting emotions.


MENELAUS.
How bright the face of heaven, and how sweet 
The air this day, that layeth at my feet 
The woman that I . . . Nay: 'twas not for her 
I came. 'Twas for the man, the cozener 
And thief, that ate with me and stole away 
My bride. But Paris lieth, this long day, 
By God's grace, under the horse-hoofs of the Greek, 
And round him all his land. And now I seek . . . 
Curse her! I scarce can speak the name she bears, 
That was my wife. Here with the prisoners 
They keep her, in these huts, among the hordes 
Of numbered slaves.--The host whose labouring swords 
Won her, have given her up to me, to fill 
My pleasure; perchance kill her, or not kill, 
But lead her home.--Methinks I have foregone 
The slaying of Helen here in Ilion . . . 
Over the long seas I will bear her back, 
And there, there, cast her out to whatso wrack 
Of angry death they may devise, who know 
Their dearest dead for her in Ilion.-Ho! 
Ye soldiers! Up into the chambers where 
She croucheth! Grip the long blood-reeking hair, 
And drag her to mine eyes . . . [Controlling himself.
			And when there come 
Fair breezes, my long ships shall bear her home.
	[The Soldiers go to force open the door of the 
		second hut on the left.


HECUBA.
Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne
Above the World, whoe'er thou art, unknown
And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be, 
Or Reason of our Reason; God, to thee 
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road 
That bringeth justice ere the end be trod 
To all that breathes and dies.

MENELAUS (turning).
	Ha! who is there
That prayeth heaven, and in so strange a prayer?


HECUBA.
I bless thee, Menelaus, I bless thee, 
If thou wilt slay her! Only fear to see 
Her visage, lest she snare thee and thou fall!
She snareth strong men's eyes; she snareth tall 
Cities; and fire from out her eateth up 
Houses. Such magic hath she, as a cup 
Of death! . . . Do I not know her? Yea, and thou, 
And these that lie around, do they not know?
	[The Soldiers return from the hut and stand 
		aside to let HELEN pass between them. 
		She comes through them, gentle and 
		unafraid; there is no disorder in her
		raiment.


HELEN.
King Menelaus, thy first deed might make 
A woman fear. Into my chamber brake 
Thine armed men, and lead me wrathfully.
Methinks, almost, I know thou hatest me.
Yet I would ask thee, what decree is gone 
Forth for my life or death?


MENELAUS (struggling with his emotion).
	There was not one
That scrupled for thee. All, all with one will 
Gave thee to me, whom thou hast wronged, to kill!


HELEN.
And is it granted that I speak, or no, 
In answer to them ere I die, to show 
I die most wronged and innocent?


MENELAUS.
	I seek 
To kill thee, woman; not to hear thee speak!


HECUBA.
O hear her! She must never die unheard, 
King Menelaus! And give me the word 
To speak in answer! All the wrong she wrought 
Away from thee, in Troy, thou knowest not. 
The whole tale set together is a death 
Too sure; she shall not 'scape thee!

MENELAUS.
	'Tis but breath 
And time. For thy sake, Hecuba, if she need 
To speak, I grant the prayer. I have no heed 
Nor mercy--let her know it well--for her!

HELEN.
It may be that, how false or true soe'er 
Thou deem me, I shall win no word from thee. 
So sore thou holdest me thine enemy. 
Yet I will take what words I think thy heart 
Holdeth of anger: and in even part 
Set my wrong and thy wrong, and all that fell.
						[Pointing to HECUBA.
	She cometh first, who bare the seed and well 
Of springing sorrow, when to life she brought 
Paris: and that old King, who quenched not 
Quick in the spark, ere yet he woke to slay, 
The firebrand's image.--But enough: a day 
Came, and this Paris judged beneath the trees 
Three Crowns of Life, three diverse Goddesses. 
The gift of Pallas was of War, to lead 
His East in conquering battles, and make bleed 
The hearths of Hellas. Hera held a Throne--
If majesties he craved--to reign alone 
From Phrygia to the last realm of the West. 
And Cypris, if he deemed her loveliest, 
Beyond all heaven, made dreams about my face 
And for her grace gave me. And, lo! her grace 
Was judged the fairest, and she stood above 
Those twain.--Thus was I loved, and thus my love 
Hath holpen Hellas. No fierce Eastern crown 
Is o'er your lands, no spear hath cast them down. 
O, it was well for Hellas! But for me 
Most ill; caught up and sold across the sea 
For this my beauty; yea, dishonoured 
For that which else had been about my head 
A crown of honour. . . . Ah, I see thy thought; 
The first plain deed, 'tis that I answer not, 
How in the dark out of thy house I fled . . . 
There came the Seed of Fire, this woman's seed; 
Came--O, a Goddess great walked with him then--
This Alexander, Breaker-down-of-Men, 
This Paris, Strength-is-with-him; whom thou, whom--
O false and light of heart--thou in thy room
Didst leave, and spreadest sail for Cretan seas, 
Far, far from me! . . . And yet, how strange it is! 
I ask not thee; I ask my own sad thought, 
What was there in my heart, that I forgot 
My home and land and all I loved, to fly 
With a strange man? Surely it was not I, 
But Cypris, there! Lay thou thy rod on her, 
And be more high than Zeus and bitterer, 
Who o'er all other spirits hath his throne, 
But knows her chain must bind him. My wrong done 
Hath its own pardon. . . .
						One word yet thou hast, 
Methinks, of righteous seeming. When at last 
The earth for Paris oped and all was o'er, 
And her strange magic bound my feet no more, 
Why kept I still his house, why fled not I 
To the Argive ships? . . . Ah, how I strove to fly! 
The old Gate-Warden could have told thee all, 
My husband, and the watchers from the wall; 
It was not once they took me, with the rope 
Tied, and this body swung in the air, to grope 
Its way toward thee, from that dim battlement. 
	Ah, husband still, how shall thy hand be bent 
To slay me? Nay, if Right be come at last, 
What shalt thou bring but comfort for pains past, 
And harbour for a woman storm-driven: 
A woman borne away by violent men: 
And this one birthright of my beauty, this 
That might have been my glory, lo, it is 
A stamp that God hath burned, of slavery! 
Alas! and if thou cravest still to be 
As one set above gods, inviolate, 
'Tis but a fruitless longing holds thee yet.


LEADER.
O Queen, think of thy children and thy land, 
And break her spell! The sweet soft speech, the hand 
And heart so fell: it maketh me afraid.


HECUBA.
Meseems her goddesses first cry mine aid 
Against these lying lips! . . . Not Hera, nay, 
Nor virgin Pallas deem I such low clay, 
To barter their own folk, Argos and brave 
Athens, to be trod down, the Phrygian's slave, 
All for vain glory and a shepherd's prize 
On Ida! Wherefore should great Hera's eyes 
So hunger to be fair? She doth not use 
To seek for other loves, being wed with Zeus. 
And maiden Pallas . . . did some strange god's face 
Beguile her, that she craved for loveliness, 
Who chose from God one virgin gift above 
All gifts, and fleeth from the lips of love?
	Ah, deck not out thine own heart's evil springs 
By making spirits of heaven as brutish things 
And cruel. The wise may hear thee, and guess all!
	And Cypris must take ship--fantastical! 
Sail with my son and enter at the gate 
To seek thee! Had she willed it, she had sate 
At peace in heaven, and wafted thee, and all 
Amyclae with thee, under Ilion's wall.
	My son was passing beautiful, beyond 
His peers; and thine own heart, that saw and conned 
His face, became a spirit enchanting thee. 
For all wild things that in mortality
Have being, are Aphrodite; and the name 
She bears in heaven is born and writ of them.
	Thou sawest him in gold and orient vest 
Shining, and lo, a fire about thy breast 
Leapt! Thou hadst fed upon such little things, 
Pacing thy ways in Argos. But now wings 
Were come! Once free from Sparta, and there rolled 
The Ilian glory, like broad streams of gold, 
To steep thine arms and splash the towers! How small, 
How cold that day was Menelaus' hall!
	Enough of that. It was by force my son 
Took thee, thou sayst, and striving. . . . Yet not one 
In Sparta knew! No cry, no sudden prayer 
Rang from thy rooms that night. . . . Castor was there 
To hear thee, and his brother: both true men, 
Not yet among the stars! And after, when 
Thou camest here to Troy, and in thy track 
Argos and all its anguish and the rack 
Of war--Ah God!--perchance men told thee 'Now 
The Greek prevails in battle': then wouldst thou 
Praise Menelaus, that my son might smart, 
Striving with that old image in a heart 
Uncertain still. Then Troy had victories: 
And this Greek was as naught! Alway thine eyes 
Watched Fortune's eyes, to follow hot where she 
Led first. Thou wouldst not follow Honesty.
	Thy secret ropes, thy body swung to fall
Far, like a desperate prisoner, from the wall! 
Who found thee so? When wast thou taken? Nay, 
Hadst thou no surer rope, no sudden way 
Of the sword, that any woman honest-souled 
Had sought long since, loving her lord of old?
	Often and often did I charge thee; 'Go, 
My daughter; go thy ways. My sons will know 
New loves. I will give aid, and steal thee past 
The Argive watch. O give us peace at last, 
Us and our foes!' But out thy spirit cried 
As at a bitter word. Thou hadst thy pride 
In Alexander's house, and O, 'twas sweet 
To hold proud Easterns bowing at thy feet. 
They were great things to thee! . . . And comest thou now 
Forth, and hast decked thy bosom and thy brow, 
And breathest with thy lord the same blue air, 
Thou evil heart? Low, low, with ravaged hair, 
Rent raiment, and flesh shuddering, and within--
O shame at last, not glory for thy sin; 
So face him if thou canst! . . . Lo, I have done. 
Be true, O King; let Hellas bear her crown 
Of justice. Slay this woman, and upraise 
The law for evermore: she that betrays 
Her husband's bed, let her be judged and die.


LEADER.
Be strong, O King; give judgment worthily 
For thee and thy great house. Shake off thy long 
Reproach; not weak, but iron against the wrong!


MENELAUS.
Thy thought doth walk with mine in one intent. 
'Tis sure; her heart was willing, when she went 
Forth to a stranger's bed. And all her fair 
Tale of enchantment, 'tis a thing of air! . . .
			[Turning furiously upon HELEN.
Out, woman! There be those that seek thee yet 
With stones! Go, meet them. So shall thy long debt 
Be paid at last. And ere this night is o'er 
Thy dead face shall dishonour me no more!


HELEN (kneeling before him and embracing him).
Behold, mine arms are wreathed about thy knees; 
Lay not upon my head the phantasies 
Of Heaven. Remember all, and slay me not!


HECUBA.
Remember them she murdered, them that fought 
Beside thee, and their children! Hear that prayer!


MENELAUS.
Peace, aged woman, peace! 'Tis not for her; 
She is as naught to me.
	(To the Soldiers) . . . March on before, 
Ye ministers, and tend her to the shore . . . 
And have some chambered galley set for her, 
Where she may sail the seas.


HECUBA.
			If thou be there, 
I charge thee, let not her set foot therein!


MENELAUS.
How? Shall the ship go heavier for her sin?


HECUBA.
A lover once, will alway love again.

MENELAUS.
If that he loved be evil, he will fain 
Hate it! . . . Howbeit, thy pleasure shall be done. 
Some other ship shall bear her, not mine own. . . . 
Thou counsellest very well . . . And when we come 
To Argos, then . . . O then some pitiless doom 
Well-earned, black as her heart! One that shall bind 
Once for all time the law on womankind 
Of faithfulness! . . . 'Twill be no easy thing, 
God knoweth. But the thought thereof shall fling 
A chill on the dreams of women, though they be 
Wilder of wing and loathed more than she!
	[Exit, followlng HELEN, who is escorted by the Soldiers.
_______________________

CHORUS.
Some Women.
						[Strophe I.
And hast thou turned from the Altar of frankincense,
And given to the Greek thy temple of Ilion ?
The flame of the cakes of corn, is it gone from hence,
The myrrh on the air and the wreathed towers gone? 
And Ida, dark Ida, where the wild ivy grows, 
The glens that run as rivers from the summer-broken snows, 
And the Rock, is it forgotten, where the first sunbeam glows,
The lit house most holy of the Dawn?


Others.
						[Antistrophe I.
The sacrifice is gone and the sound of joy,
The dancing under the stars and the night-long prayer:
The Golden Images and the Moons of Troy,
The twelve Moons and the mighty names they bear:
My heart, my heart crieth, O Lord Zeus on high,
Were they all to thee as nothing, thou throned in the sky,
Throned in the fire-cloud, where a City, near to die,
Passeth in the wind and the flare?


A Woman.
						[Strophe 2.
Dear one, O husband mine, 
Thou in the dim dominions 
Driftest with waterless lips, 
Unburied; and me the ships 
Shall bear o'er the bitter brine,
Storm-birds upon angry pinions, 
Where the towers of the Giants shine 
O'er Argos cloudily, 
And the riders ride by the sea.


Others.
And children still in the Gate 
Crowd and cry, 
A multitude desolate, 
Voices that float and wait
As the tears run dry:
'Mother, alone on the shore
They drive me, far from thee: 
Lo, the dip of the oar,
The black hull on the sea! 
Is it the Isle Immortal,
Salamis, waits for me? 
Is it the Rock that broods 
Over the sundered floods 
Of Corinth, the ancient portal
Of Pelops' sovranty ?


A Woman.
						[Antistrophe 2. 
Out in the waste of foam, 
	Where rideth dark Menelaus, 
Come to us there, O white 
And jagged, with wild sea-light 
And crashing of oar-blades, come,
	O thunder of God, and slay us: 
While our tears are wet for home, 
While out in the storm go we, 
Slaves of our enemy!


Others.
And, God, may Helen be there, 
	With mirror of gold, 
Decking her face so fair, 
Girl-like; and hear, and stare, 
	And turn death-cold: N
ever, ah, never more
	The hearth of her home to see,
Nor sand of the Spartan shore,
	Nor tombs where her fathers be,
Nor Athena's bronzen Dwelling, 
	Nor the towers of Pitane; 
For her face was a dark desire 
Upon Greece, and shame like fire, 
And her dead are welling, welling, 
	From red Simois to the sea!
______________________


[TALTHYBIUS, followed by one or two Soldiers 
	and bearing the child ASTYANAX dead, is 
	seen approaching.


LEADER.
Ah, change on change! Yet each one racks 
	This land evil manifold; 
	Unhappy wives of Troy, behold, 
They bear the dead Astyanax, 
Our prince, whom bitter Greeks this hour 
Have hurled to death from Ilion's tower.


TALTHYBIUS.

One galley, Hecuba, there lingereth yet, 
Lapping the wave, to father the last freight 
Of Pyrrhus' spoils for Thessaly. The chief 
Himself long since hath parted, much in grief 
For PeIeus' sake, his grandsire, whom, men say, 
Acastus, Pelias' son, in war array 
Hath driven to exile. Loath enough before 
Was he to linger, and now goes the more 
In haste, bearing Andromache, his prize. 
'Tis she hath charmed these tears into mine eyes, 
Weeping her fatherland, as o'er the wave 
She gazed, and speaking words to Hector's grave.
Howbeit, she prayed us that due rites be done 
For burial of this babe, thine Hector's son, 
That now from Ilion's tower is fallen and dead. 
And, lo! this great bronze-fronted shield, the dread 
Of many a Greek, that Hector held in fray, 
O never in God's name--so did she pray-- 
Be this borne forth to hang in Peleus' hall 
Or that dark bridal chamber, that the wall 
May hurt her eyes; but here, in Troy o'erthrown, 
Instead of cedar wood and vaulted stone, 
Be this her child's last house. . . . And in thine hands 
She bade me lay him, to be swathed in hands 
Of death and garments, such as rest to thee 
In these thy fallen fortunes; seeing that she 
Hath gone her ways, and, for her master's haste, 
May no more fold the babe unto his rest. 
	Howbeit, so soon as he is garlanded 
And robed, we will heap earth above his head 
And lift our sails. . . . See all be swiftly done, 
As thou art bidden. I have saved thee one 
Labour. For as I passed Scamander's stream 
Hard by, I let the waters run on him, 
And cleansed his wounds.--See, I will go forth now 
And break the hard earth for his grave: so thou 
And I will haste together, to set free 
Our oars at last to beat the homeward sea!

[He goes out with his Soldiers, leaving the body 
	of the Child in HECUBA'S arms.


HECUBA.
Set the great orb of Hector's shield to lie 
Here on the ground. 'Tis bitter that mine eye
Should see it. . . . O ye Argives, was your spear 
Keen, and your hearts so low and cold, to fear 
This babe? 'Twas a strange murder for brave men! 
For fear this babe some day might raise again 
His fallen land! Had ye so little pride ? 
While Hector fought, and thousands at his side, 
Ye smote us, and we perished; and now, now, 
When all are dead and Ilion lieth low, 
Ye dread this innocent! I deem it not 
Wisdom, that rage of fear that hath no thought. . . .
	Ah, what a death hath found thee, little one! 
Hadst thou but fallen fighting, hadst thou known 
Strong youth and love and all the majesty 
Of godlike kings, then had we spoken of thee 
As of one blessed . . . could in any wise 
These days know blessedness. But now thine eyes 
Have seen, thy lips have tasted, but thy soul 
No knowledge had nor usage of the whole 
Rich life that lapt thee round. . . . Poor little child! 
Was it our ancient wall, the circuit piled 
By loving Gods, so savagely hath rent 
Thy curls, these little flowers innocent 
That were thy mother's garden, where she laid 
Her kisses; here, just where the bone-edge frayed 
Grins white above--Ah heaven, I will not see!
	Ye tender arms, the same dear mould have ye 
As his; how from the shoulder loose ye drop 
And weak! And dear proud lips, so full of hope 
And closed for ever! What false words ye said 
At daybreak, when he crept into my bed, 
Called me kind names, and promised: 'Grandmother, 
When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair
And lead out all the captains to ride by
Thy tomb.' Why didst thou cheat me so? 'Tis I, 
Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed 
Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.
	Dear God, the pattering welcomes of thy feet, 
The nursing in my lap; and O, the sweet 
Falling asleep together! All is gone. 
How should a poet carve the funeral stone 
To tell thy story true? 'There lieth here 
A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear 
Slew him.' Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells!
	Child, they have left thee beggared of all else 
In Hector's house; but one thing shalt thou keep, 
This war-shield bronzen-barred, wherein to sleep. 
Alas, thou guardian true of Hector's fair
Left arm, how art thou masterless! And there 
I see his handgrip printed on the hold; 
And deep stains of the precious sweat, that rolled 
In battle from the brows and beard of him, 
Drop after drop, are writ about thy rim.
	Go, bring them--such poor garments hazardous 
As these days leave. God hath not granted us 
Wherewith to make much pride. But all I can, 
I give thee, Child of Troy.--O vain is man, W
ho glorieth in his joy and hath no fears: 
While to and fro the chances of the years 
Dance like an idiot in the wind! And none 
By any strength hath his own fortune won.

[During these lines several Women are seen
	approaching with garlands and raiment in 
	their hands.


LEADER.
Lo these, who bear thee raiment harvested 
From Ilion's slain, to fold upon the dead.

[During the following scene HECUBA gradually 
	takes the garments and wraps them about 
	the Child.


HECUBA.
O not in pride for speeding of the car 
Beyond thy peers, not for the shaft of war 
True aimed, as Phrygians use; not any prize 
Of joy for thee, nor splendour in men's eyes, 
Thy father's mother lays these offerings 
About thee, from the many fragrant things 
That were all thine of old. But now no more. 
One woman, loathed of God, hath broke the door 
And robbed thy treasure-house, and thy warm breath 
Made cold, and trod thy people down to death!


CHORUS.
Some Women.
Deep in the heart of me 
I feel thine hand, 
Mother: and is it he
Dead here, our prince to be, 
And lord of the land?


HECUBA.
Glory of Phrygian raiment, which my thought 
Kept for thy bridal day with some far-sought 
Queen of the East, folds thee for evermore.
	And thou, grey Mother, Mother-Shield that bore
A thousand days of glory, thy last crown
Is here. . . . Dear Hector's shield! Thou shalt lie down
Undying with the dead, and lordlier there
Than all the gold Odysseus' breast can bear,
The evil and the strong!


CHORUS.
Some Women.
Child of the Shield-bearer,
Alas, Hector's child!
Great Earth, the All-mother, 
Taketh thee unto her
With wailing wild!


Others.
Mother of misery,
Give Death his song!
(HEC. Woe!) Aye and bitterly
(HEC. Woe!) We too weep for thee,
And the infinite wrong!
	[During these lines HECUBA, kneeling by the
		body, has been performing a funeral rite, 
		symbolically staunching the dead Child's 
		wounds.


HECUBA.
			I make thee whole; 
I bind thy wounds, O little vanished soul. 
This wound and this I heal with linen white: 
O emptiness of aid! . . . Yet let the rite 
Be spoken. This and . . . Nay, not I, but he, 
Thy father far away shall comfort thee!
	[She bows her head to the ground and remains 
		motionless and unseeing.


CHORUS.
Beat, beat thine head: 
	Beat with the wailing chime 
	Of hands lifted in time:
Beat and bleed for the dead.
Woe is me for the dead!


HECUBA.
O Women! Ye, mine own . . .
	[She rises bewildered, as though she had seen a 
		vision.


LEADER.
							Hecuba, speak! 
Thine are we all. Oh, ere thy bosom break . . .


HECUBA.
Lo, I have seen the open hand of God; 
And in it nothing, nothing, save the rod 
Of mine affliction, and the eternal hate, 
Beyond all lands, chosen and lifted great 
For Troy! Vain, vain were prayer and incense-swell 
And bulls' blood on the altars! . . . All is well. 
Had He not turned us in His hand, and thrust 
Our high things low and shook our hills as dust, 
We had not been this splendour, and our wrong 
An everlasting music for the song 
Of earth and heaven!
		Go, women: lay our dead 
In his low sepulchre. He hath his meed 
Of robing. And, methinks, but little care 
Toucheth the tomb, if they that moulder there
Have rich encerement. 'Tis we, 'tis we, 
That dream, we living and our vanity!
	[The Women bear out the dead Child upon the 
		shield, singing, when presently flames of 
		fire and dim forms are seen among the 
		ruins of the City.


CHORUS.
Some Women.
Woe for the mother that bare thee, child,
	Thread so frail of a hope so high, 
That Time hath broken: and all men smiled 
	About thy cradle, and, passing by, 
	Spoke of thy father's majesty. 
		Low, low, thou liest!


Others.
Ha! Who be these on the crested rock? 
Fiery hands in the dusk, and a shock
Of torches flung! What lingereth still, 
O wounded City, of unknown ill, 
		Ere yet thou diest?


TALTHYBIUS (coming out through the ruined Wall).
Ye Captains that have charge to wreck this keep 
Of Priam's City, let your torches sleep 
No more! Up, fling the fire into her heart! 
Then have we done with Ilion, and may part 
In joy to Hellas from this evil land.
	And ye--so hath one word two faces--stand,
Daughters of Troy, till on your ruined wall 
The echo of my master's trumpet call 
In signal breaks: then, forward to the sea, 
Where the long ships lie waiting.
					And for thee, 
O ancient woman most unfortunate, 
Follow: Odysseus' men be here, and wait 
To guide thee . . . . 'Tis to him thou go'st for thrall.


HECUBA.
Ah, me! and is it come, the end of all, 
The very crest and summit of my days? 
I go forth from my land, and all its ways 
Are filled with fire! Bear me, O aged feet, 
A little nearer: I must gaze, and greet 
My poor town ere she fall.
					Farewell, farewell!
O thou whose breath was mighty on the swell 
Of orient winds, my Troy! Even thy name 
Shall soon be taken from thee. Lo, the flame 
Hath thee, and we, thy children, pass away 
To slavery . . . God! O God of mercy! . . . Nay: 
Why call I on the Gods? They know, they know, 
My prayers, and would not hear them long ago. 
Quick, to the flames! O, in thine agony, 
My Troy, mine own, take me to die with thee!
	[She springs toward the games, but is seized and 
		held by the Soldiers.


TALTHYBIUS.
Back! Thou art drunken with thy miseries, 
Poor woman!--Hold her fast, men, till it please
Odysseus that she come. She was his lot
Chosen from all and portioned. Lose her not!
	[He goes to watch over the burning of the City. 
		The dusk deepens.


CHORUS.
Divers Women.
Woe, woe, woe!
Thou of the Ages, O wherefore fleest thou,
Lord of the Phrygian, Father that made us?
'Tis we, thy children; shall no man aid us?
'Tis we, thy children! Seest thou, seest thou?


Others.
He seeth, only his heart is pitiless;
And the land dies: yea, she,
She of the Mighty Cities perisheth citiless
Troy shall no more be!


Others.
Woe, woe, woe!
	Ilion shineth afar!
Fire in the deeps thereof, 
Fire in the heights above,
	And crested walls of War!


Others.
As smoke on the wing of heaven
	Climbeth and scattereth,
Torn of the spear and driven,
	The land crieth for death:
O stormy battlements that red fire hath riven,
	And the sword's angry breath!
	[A new thought comes to HECUBA; she kneels 
		and beats the earth with her hands.


HECUBA. 				 [Strophe.
O Earth, Earth of my children; hearken! and O mine own, 
Ye have hearts and forget not, ye in the darkness lying!


LEADER.
Now hast thou found thy prayer, crying to them that 
	are gone.


HECUBA.
Surely my knees are weary, but I kneel above your head;
Hearken, O ye so silent! My hands beat your bed!


LEADER.
		I, I am near thee;
		I kneel to thy dead to hear thee,
Kneel to mine own in the darkness; O husband, hear
	my crying!


HECUBA.
Even as the beasts they drive, even as the loads they bear,


LEADER.
(Pain; O pain!)


HECUBA.
We go to the house of bondage. Hear, ye dead, O hear!


LEADER.
(Go, and come not again!)


HECUBA.
Priam, mine own Priam, 
	Lying so lowly, 
Thou in thy nothingness, 
Shelterless, comfortless, 
See'st thou the thing I am?
Know'st thou my bitter stress?


LEADER.
Nay, thou art naught to him! 
Out of the strife there came, 
Out of the noise and shame, 
Making his eyelids dim,
	Death, the Most Holy!

[The fire and smoke rise constantly higher.


HECUBA.
						[Antistrophe.
O high houses of Gods, beloved streets of my birth,
Ye have found the way of the sword, the fiery and 
	blood-red river!


LEADER.
Fall, and men shall forget you! Ye shall lie in the 
	gentle earth.


HECUBA.
The dust as smoke riseth; it spreadeth wide its wing;
It maketh me as a shadow, and my City a vanished 
	thing!


LEADER.
Out on the smoke she goeth, 
And her name no man knoweth;
And the cloud is northward, southward; Troy is gone 
	for ever!
	[A great crash is heard, and the Wall is lost in 
		smoke and darkness.


HECUBA.
Ha! Marked ye? Heard ye? The crash of the 
	towers that fall!


LEADER.
All is gone!


HECUBA.
Wrath in the earth and quaking and a flood that 
	sweepeth all,


LEADER.
And passeth on!
	[The Greek trumpet sounds.


HECUBA.
Farewell!-O spirit grey, 
	Whatso is coming, 
Fail not from under me. 
Weak limbs, why tremble ye? 
Forth where the new long day 
Dawneth to slavery!


CHORUS.
Farewell from parting lips,
Farewell!--Come, I and thou, 
Whatso may wait us now, 
Forth to the Iong Greek ships 
	And the sea's foaming.
[The trumpet sounds again, and the Women go 
	out in the darkness.



NOTES ON THE TROJAN WOMEN

P. 11, 1. 5, Poseidon.]--In the Iliad Poseidon is the enemy of Troy, here the friend. This sort of confusion comes from the fact that the Trojans and their Greek enemies were largely of the same blood, with the same tribal gods. To the Trojans, Athena the War-Goddess was, of course, their War-Goddess, the protectress of their citadel. Poseidon, god of the sea and its merchandise, and Apollo (possibly a local shepherd god?), were their natural friends and had actually built their city wall for love of the good old king, Laomedon. Zeus, the great father, had Mount Ida for his holy hill and Troy for his peculiar city. (Cf. on p. 63.)

To suit the Greek point of view all this had to be changed or explained away. In the Iliad generally Athena is the proper War-Goddess of the Greeks. Poseidon had indeed built the wall for Laomedon, but Laomedon had cheated him of his reward--as afterwards he cheated Heracles, and the Argonauts and everybody else! So Poseidon hated Troy. Troy is chiefly defended by the barbarian Ares, the oriental Aphrodite, by its own rivers Scamander and Simois and suchlike inferior or unprincipled gods.

Yet traces of the other tradition remain. Homer knows that Athena is specially worshipped in Troy. He knows that Apollo, who had built the wall with Poseidon, and had the same experience of Laomedon, still loves the Trojans. Zeus himself, though eventually in obedience to destiny he permits the fall of the city, nevertheless has a great tenderness towards it.

P. 11, 1. 11, A steed marvellous.]--See below, on P. 36.

P. 12, 1. 25, I go forth from great Ilion, &-c.]--The correct ancient doctrine. When your gods forsook you, there was no more hope. Conversely, when your state became desperate, evidently your gods were forsaking you. From another point of view, also, when the city was desolate and unable to worship its gods, the gods of that city were no more.

P. 12, 1. 34, Laconian Tyndarid.]--Helen was the child of Zeus and Leda, and sister of Castor and Polydeuces; but her human father was Tyndareus, an old Spartan king. She is treated as "a prisoner and a prize," i.e., as a captured enemy, not as a Greek princess delivered from the Trojans.

P. 12, 1. 40, In secret slain.]--Because the Greeks were ashamed of the bloody deed. See below, P. 42, and the scene on this subject in the Hecuba.

P. 12, 1. 42, Cassandra.]--In the Agamemnon the story is more clearly told, that Cassandra was loved by Apollo and endowed by him with the power of prophecy; then in some way she rejected or betrayed him, and he set upon her the curse that though seeing the truth she should never be believed. The figure of Cassandra in this play is not inconsistent with that version, but it makes a different impression. She is here a dedicated virgin, and her mystic love for Apollo does not seem to have suffered any breach.

P. 13, 1. 47, Pallas.]--(See above.) The historical explanation of the Trojan Pallas and the Greek Pallas is simple enough ; but as soon as the two are mythologically personified and made one, there emerges just such a bitter and ruthless goddess as Euripides, in his revolt against the current mythology, loved to depict. But it is not only the mythology that he is attacking. He seems really to feel that if there are conscious gods ruling the world, they are cruel or "inhuman" beings.

P. 15, 1. 70.]--Ajax the Less, son of Oileus, either ravished or attempted to ravish Cassandra (the story occurs in both forms) while she was clinging to the Palladium or image of Pallas. It is one of the great typical sins of the Sack of Troy, often depicted on vases.

P. 17, 1. 123, Faces of ships.]--Homeric ships had prows shaped and painted to look like birds' or beasts' heads. A ship was always a wonderfully live and vivid thing to the Greek poets. (Cf. p. 64.)

P. 18, 1. 132, Castor.]--Helen's brother: the Eurotas, the river of her home, Sparta.

P. 18, 1. 135, Fifty seeds.]--Priam had fifty children, nineteen of them children of Hecuba (Il. vi. 451, &c.) .

P. 22, 1. 205, Pirene.]--The celebrated spring on the hill of Corinth. Drawing water was a typical employment of slaves.

P. 22, 1. 219 ff., Theseus' land, &c.]--Theseus' land is Attica. The poet, in the midst of his bitterness over the present conduct of his city, clings the more to its old fame for humanity. The "land high-born" where the Peneus flows round the base of Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly is one of the haunts of Euripides' dreams in many plays. Cf. Bacchae, 410 (P. 97 in my translation). Mount Aetna fronts the "Tyrians' citadel," i.e., Carthage, built by the Phoenicians. The "sister land" is the district of Sybaris in South Italy, where the river Crathis has, or had, a red-gold colour, which makes golden the hair of men and the fleeces of sheep; and the water never lost its freshness.

P. 23, 1. 235.]--Talthybius is a loyal soldier with every wish to be kind. But he is naturally in good spirits over the satisfactory end of the war, and his tact is not sufficient to enable him to understand the Trojan Women's feelings. Yet in the end, since he has to see and do the cruelties which his Chiefs only order from a distance, the real nature of his work forces itself upon him, and he feels and speaks at times almost like a Trojan. It is worth noticing how the Trojan Women generally avoid addressing him. (Cf. PP. 48, 67, 74.)

P. 24, 1. 256, The haunted keys (literally, "with God through them, penetrating them").]--Cassandra was his Key-bearer, holding the door of his Holy Place. (Cf. Hip. 540, P. 30.)

P. 25, 1. 270, She hath a toil, &c.]--There is something true and pathetic about this curious blindness which prevents Hecuba from understanding "so plain a riddle." (Cf. below, P. 42.) She takes the watching of a Tomb to be some strange Greek custom, and does not seek to have it explained further.

P. 26, 1. 277, Odysseus.]--In Euripides generally Odysseus is the type of the successful unscrupulous man, as soldier and politician--the incarnation of what the poet most hated. In Homer of course he is totally different.

P. 27, i. 301, Burn themselves and die.]--Women under these circumstances did commit suicide in Euripides' day, as they have ever since. It is rather curious that none of the characters of the play, not even Andromache, kills herself. The explanation must be that no such suicide was recorded in the tradition (though cf. below, on P. 33) ; a significant fact, suggesting that in the Homeric age, when this kind of treatment of women captives was regular, the victims did not suffer quite so terribly under it.

P. 28, 1. 310, Hymen.]--She addresses the Torch. The shadowy Marriage-god "Hymen" was a torch and a cry as much as anything more personal. As a torch he is the sign both of marriage and of death, of sunrise and of the consuming fire. The full Moon was specially connected with marriage ceremonies.

P. 30, 1. 356, Loxias.]--The name of Apollo as an Oracular God.

PP. 30-34, 11. 360-460, Cassandra's visions.]--The allusions are to the various sufferings of Odysseus, as narrated in the Odyssey, and to the tragedies of the house of Atreus, as told for instance in Aeschylus' Oresteia. Agamemnon together with Cassandra, and in part because he brought Cassandra, was murdered--felled with an axe--on his return home by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Their bodies were cast into a pit among the rocks. In vengeance for this, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, committed "mother-murder," and in consequence was driven by the Ernyes (Furies) of his mother into madness and exile.

P. 30, 1. 370, This their king so wise.]--Agamemnon made the war for the sake of his brother Menelaus, and slew his daughter, lphigenia, as a sacrifice at Aulis, to enable the ships to sail for Troy.

P. 31, 11. 394, 398, Hector and Paris.]-The point about Hector is clear, but as to Paris, the feeling that, after all, it was a glory that he and the half-divine Helen loved each other, is scarcely to be found anywhere else in Greek literature. (Cf., however, Isocrates' "Praise of Helen.") Paris and Helen were never idealised like Launcelot and Guinevere, or Tristram and Iseult.

P. 32, 1. 423, A wise queen.]--Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.

P. 33, 1. 425, O Heralds, yea, Voices of Death.]--There is a play on the word for "heralds" in the Greek here, which I have evaded by a paraphrase. (Knp-uxes as though from Knp the death-spirit, "the one thing abhorred of all mortal men.")

P. 33, 1. 430, That in this place she dies.]--The death of Hecuba is connected with a certain heap of stones on the shore of the Hellespont, called Kunossema, or "Dog's Tomb." According to one tradition (Eur. Hec. 1259 ff.) she threw herself off the ship into the sea; according to another she was stoned by the Greeks for her curses upon the fleet; but in both she is changed after death into a sort of Bell-hound. M. Victor Berard suggests that the dog first comes into the story owing to the accidental resemblance of the (hypothetical) Semitic word S'qoulah, "Stone" or "Stoning," and the Greek Skulax, dog. The Homeric Scylla (Skulla) was also both a Stone and a Dog (Pheniciens et Odyssee, i. 213). Of course in the present passage there is no direct reference to these wild sailor-stories.

P. 34, 1. 456, The wind comes quick.]--i.e. The storm of the Prologue. Three Powers : the three Erinyes.

P. 36, 1. 511 ff., Chorus.]--The Wooden Horse is always difficult to understand, and seems to have an obscuring effect on the language of poets who treat of it. I cannot help suspecting that the story arises from a real historical incident misunderstood. Troy, we are told, was still holding out after ten years and could not be taken, until at last by the divine suggestions of Athena, a certain Epeios devised a "Wooden Horse."

What was the "device"? According to the Odyssey and most Greek poets, it was a gigantic wooden figure of a horse. A party of heroes, led by Odysseus, got inside it and waited. The Greeks made a show of giving up the siege and sailed away, but only as far as Tenedos. The Trojans came out and found the horse, and after wondering greatly what it was meant for and what to do with it, made a breach in their walls and dragged it into the Citadel as a thank-offering to Pallas. In the night the Greeks returned ; the heroes in the horse came out and opened the gates, and Troy was captured.

It seems possible that the "device" really was the building of a wooden siege-tower, as high as the walls, with a projecting and revolving neck. Such engines were (I) capable of being used at the time in Asia, as a rare and extraordinary device, because they exist on early Assyrian monuments; (2) certain to be misunderstood in Greek legendary tradition, because they were not used in Greek warfare till many centuries later. (First, perhaps, at the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium by Philip of Macedon, 340 B.C.)

It is noteworthy that in the great picture by Polygnotus in the Lesche at Delphi "above the wall of Troy appears the head alone of the Wooden Horse" (Paus. X. 26). Aeschylus also (Ag. 816) has some obscure phrases pointing in the same direction: "A horse's brood, a shield-bearing people, launched with a leap about the Pleiads' setting, sprang clear above the wall," &c. Euripides here treats the horse metaphorically as a sort of war-horse trampling Troy.

P. 37, 1. 536, Her that spareth not, Heaven's yokeless rider.]--Athena like a northern Valkyrie, as often in the Iliad. If one tries to imagine what Athena, the War-Goddess worshipped by the Athenian mob, was like--what a mixture of bad national passions, of superstition and statecraft, of slip-shod unimaginative idealisation--one may partly understand why Euripides made her so evil. Allegorists and high-minded philosophers might make Athena entirely noble by concentrating their minds on the beautiful elements in the tradition, and forgetting or explaining away all that was savage; he was determined to pin her down to the worst facts recorded of her, and let people worship such a being if they liked!

P. 38, 1. 554, To Artemis.]--Maidens at the shrine of Artemis are a fixed datum in the tradition. (Cf. Hec. 935 ff.)

P. 39 ff., 1. 576 ff., Andromache and Hecuba.]--This very beautiful scene is perhaps marred to most modern readers by an element which is merely a part of the convention of ancient mourning. Each of the mourners cries: "There is no affliction like mine!" and then proceeds to argue, as it were, against the other's counter claim. One can only say that it was, after all, what they expected of each other; and I believe the same convention exists in most places where keening or wailing is an actual practice.

P. 41, 1. 604, Even as the sound of a song.]--I have filled in some words which seem to be missing in the Greek here.

PP. 41-50, Andromache.]--This character is wonderfully studied. She seems to me to be a woman who has not yet shown much character or perhaps had very intense experience, but is only waiting for sufficiently great trials to become a heroine and a saint. There is still a marked element of conventionality in her description of her life with Hector; but one feels, as she speaks, that she is already past it. Her character is built up of "Sophrosyne," of self-restraint and the love of goodness--qualities which often seem second-rate or even tiresome until they have a sufficiently great field in which to act. Very characteristic is her resolution to make the best, and not the worst, of her life in Pyrrhus' house, with all its horror of suffering and apparent degradation. So is the self-conquest by which she deliberately refrains from cursing her child's murderers, for the sake of the last poor remnant of good she can still do to him, in getting him buried. The nobility of such a character depends largely, of course, on the intensity of the feelings conquered.

It is worth noting, in this connection, that Euripides is contradicting a wide-spread tradition (Robert, Bild und Lied, pp. 63 ff.). Andromache, in the pictures of the Sack of Troy, is represented with a great pestle or some such instrument fighting with the Soldiers to rescue Astyanax.

Observe, too, what a climax of drama is reached by means of the very fact that Andromache, to the utmost of her power, tries to do nothing "dramatic," but only what will be best. Her character in Euripides' play, Andromache, is, on the whole, similar to this, but less developed.

P. 51, 1. 799 ff., In Salamis, filled with the foaming, &c.]--A striking instance of the artistic value of the Greek chorus in relieving an intolerable strain. The relief provided is something much higher than what we ordinarily call "relief"; it is a stream of pure poetry and music in key with the sadness of the surrounding scene, yet, in a way, happy just because it is beautiful. (Cf. note on Hippolytus, I. 732.)

The argument of the rather difficult lyric is:

"This is not the first time Troy has been taken. Long ago Heracles made war against the old king Laomedon, because he had not given him the immortal steeds that he promised. And Telamon joined him; Telamon who might have been happy in his island of Salamis, among the bees and the pleasant waters, looking over the strait to the olive-laden hills of Athens, the beloved City! And they took ship and slew Laomedon. Yea, twice Zeus has destroyed Ilion!

(Second part.) Is it all in vain that our Trojan princes have been loved by the Gods? Ganymedes pours the nectar of Zeus in his banquets, his face never troubled, though his motherland is burned with fire! And, to say nothing of Zeus, how can the Goddess of Morning rise and shine upon us uncaring? She loved Tithonus, son of Laomedon, and bore him up from us in a chariot to be her husband in the skies. But all that once made them love us is gone!"

P. 52, 1. 833, Pools of thy bathing.]--It is probable that Ganymedes was himself originally a pool or a spring on Ida, now a pourer of nectar in heaven.

Pp. 54-63, Menelaus and Helen.]--The meeting of Menelaus and Helen after the taking of Troy was naturally one of the great moments in the heroic legend. The versions, roughly speaking, divide themselves into two. In one (Little Iliad, Ar. Lysistr. 155, Eur. Andromache 628) Menelaus is about to kill her, but as she bares her bosom to the sword, the sword falls from his hand. In the other (Stesichorus, Sack of Ilion (?)) Menelaus or some one else takes her to the ships to be stoned, and the men cannot stone her. As Quintus of Smyrna says, "They looked on her as they would on a God!"

Both versions have affected Euripides here. And his Helen has just the magic of the Helen of legend. That touch of the supernatural which belongs of right to the Child of Heaven--a mystery, a gentleness, a strange absence of fear or wrath--is felt through all her words. One forgets to think of her guilt or innocence; she is too wonderful a being to judge, too precious to destroy. This supernatural element, being the thing which, if true, separates Helen from other women, and in a way redeems her, is for that reason exactly what Hecuba denies. The controversy has a certain eternal quality about it: the hypothesis of heavenly enchantment and the hypothesis of mere bad behaviour, neither of them entirely convincing! But the very curses of those that hate her make a kind of superhuman atmosphere about Helen in this play; she fills the background like a great well-spring of pain.

This Menelaus, however, is rather different from the traditional Menelaus. Besides being the husband of Helen, he is the typical Conqueror, for whose sake the Greeks fought and to whom the central prize of the war belongs. And we take him at the height of his triumph, the very moment for which he made the war! Hence the peculiar bitterness with which he is treated, his conquest turning to ashes in his mouth, and his love a confused turmoil of hunger and hatred, contemptible and yet terrible.

The exit of the scene would leave a modern audience quite in doubt as to what happened, unless the action were much clearer than the words. But all Athenians knew from the Odyssey that the pair were swiftly reconciled, and lived happily together as King and Queen of Sparta.

P. 54, 1. 884, Thou deep base of the world.]--These lines, as a piece of religious speculation, were very famous in antiquity. And dramatically then, are most important. All through the play Hecuba is a woman of remarkable intellectual power and of fearless thought. She does not definitely deny the existence of the Olympian gods, like some characters in Euripides, but she treats them as beings that have betrayed her, and whose name she scarcely deigns to speak. It is the very godlessness of Hecuba's fortitude that makes it so terrible and, properly regarded, so noble. (Cf. P. 35 "Why call on things so weak?" and P. 74 "They know, they know . . .") Such Gods were as a matter of fact the moral inferiors of good men, and Euripides will never blind his eyes to their inferiority. And as soon as people see that their god is bad, they tend to cease believing in his existence at all. (Hecuba's answer to Helen is not inconsistent with this, it is only less characteristic.)

Behind this Olympian system, however, there is a possibility of some real Providence or impersonal Governance of the world, to which here, for a moment, Hecuba makes a passionate approach. If there is any explanation, any justice, even in the form of mere punishment of the wicked, she will be content and give worship! But it seems that there is not. Then at last there remains--what most but not all modern freethinkers would probably have begun to doubt at the very beginning--the world of the departed, the spirits of the dead, who are true, and in their dim way love her still (P. 71 "Thy father far away shall comfort thee," and the last scene of the play).

This last religion, faint and shattered by doubt as it is, represents a return to the most primitive "Pelasgian " beliefs, a worship of the Dead which existed long before the Olympian system, and has long outlived it.

P. 57, 1. 922, The fire-brand's image.]--Hecuba, just before Paris' birth, dreamed that she gave birth to a fire-brand. The prophets therefore advised that the babe should be killed; but Priam disobeyed them.

P. 57, 1. 924, Three Crowns of Life.]--On the judgment of Paris see Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, pp. 292 ff. Late writers degrade the story into a beauty contest between three thoroughly personal goddesses--and a contest complicated by bribery. But originally the Judgment is rather a Choice between three possible lives, like the Choice of Heracles between Work and Idleness. The elements of the choice vary in different versions: but in general Hera is royalty; Athena is prowess in war or personal merit; Aphrodite, of course, is love. And the goddesses are not really to be distinguished from the gifts they bring. They are what they give, and nothing more. Cf. the wonderful lyric Androm. 274 ff., where they come to "a young man walking to and fro alone, in an empty hut in the firelight."

There is an extraordinary effect in Helen herself being one of the Crowns of Life--a fair equivalent for the throne of the world.

P. 57, 1. 940 ff., Alexander . . . Paris.]--Two plays on words in the Greek.

P. 58, 1. 956, The old Gate-Warden.]--He and the Watchers are, of course, safely dead. But on the general lines of the tradition it may well be that Helen is speaking the truth. She loved both Menelaus and Paris; and, according to some versions, hated Deiphobus, the Trojan prince who seized her after Paris' death. There is a reference to Deiphobus in the MSS. of the play here, but I follow Wilamowitz in thinking it spurious.

Pp. 63 ff., Chorus.]--On the Trojan Zeus see above, on p. 11. Mount Ida caught the rays of the rising sun in some special manner and distributed them to the rest of the world; and in this gleam of heavenly fire the God had his dwelling, which is now the brighter for the flames of his City going up like incense!

Nothing definite is known of the Golden Images and the Moon-Feasts.

P. 64, 1. 1088, Towers of the Giants.]--The prehistoric castles of Tiryns and Mycenae.

P. 65, 1. 1111, May Helen be there.]--(Cf. above.) Pitane was one of the five divisions of Sparta. Athena had a "Bronzen House" on the acropolis of Sparta. Simois, of course, the river of Troy.

P. 71, 1. 1232, I make thee whole.]--Here as elsewhere Hecuba fluctuates between fidelity to the oldest and most instinctive religion, and a rejection of all Gods.

P. 72, 1. 1240, Lo, I have seen the open hand of God.]--The text is, perhaps, imperfect here; but Professor Wilamowitz agrees with me that Hecuba has seen something like a vision. The meaning of this speech is of the utmost importance. It expresses the inmost theme of the whole play, a search for an answer to the injustice of suffering in the very splendour and beauty of suffering. Of course it must be suffering of a particular kind, or, what comes to the same thing, suffering borne in a particular way; but in that case the answer seems to me to hold. One does not really think the world evil because there are martyrs or heroes in it. For them the elements of beauty which exist in any great trial of the spirit become so great as to overpower the evil that created them--to turn it from shame and misery into tragedy. Of course to most sufferers, to children and animals and weak people, or those without inspiration, the doctrine brings no help. It is a thing invented by a poet for himself.

P. 75, 1. 1288, Thou of the Ages.]--The Phrygian All-Father, identified with Zeus, son of Kronos. (Cf. on p. 11.)

P. 76, 1. 1304, Now hast thou found thy prayer.]The Gods have deserted her, but she has still the dead. (Cf. above, on P- 71.)

P. 79, I. 1332, Forth to the dark Greek ships.]--Curiously like another magnificent ending of a great poem, that of the Chanson de Roland, where Charlemagne is called forth on a fresh quest:

"Deus," dist li Reis, "si penuse est ma vie!
Pluret des oilz, sa barbe blanche tiret. . . .