Trojanwomen
Choose a text
id="mobileReaderAuthor" class="mobile-reader-author" href="/authors/euripides" aria-label="More works by Euripides">
—
⋯
Original / primary: Perseus Eng2
109
tear your cheeks with your nails! Ah me! I have fallen as a slave to a treacherous foe I hate, a monster of lawlessness,
110
one that by his double tongue has turned against us all that once was friendly in his camp, changing this for that and that for this again. Oh weep for me, you Trojan women! Lost and ill-fated!
111
Ah woe! a victim to a most unhappy lot!
112
112
Chorus Leader
112
Your fate, royal mistress, now you know; but for me, what Helene or Achaean is master of my destiny?
113
113
Talthybius
113
Go, servants, and bring Cassandra forth to me here
114
at once, that I may place her in our captain’s hands, and then conduct to the rest of the chiefs the captives each has had assigned. Ha! what is the blaze of torches there within? What are they doing? Are they firing the chambers,
115
because they must leave this land and be carried away to Argos? Are they setting themselves aflame in their longing for death? Truly the free bear their troubles in cases like this with a stiff neck. Open up! lest their deed, which suits them well
116
but finds small favor with the Achaeans, bring blame on me.
117
117
Hecuba
117
It is not that they are setting anything ablaze, but my child Cassandra, frenzied maid, comes rushing wildly here.
118
118
Cassandra
118
Bring the light, uplift and show its flame! I am doing the god’s service, see! see! making his shrine to glow with tapers bright.
119
O Hymen, lord of marriage! blessed is the bridegroom; blessed am I also, soon to wed a princely lord in Argos. Hail Hymen, lord of marriage!
120
Since you, my mother, are busied with tears and lamentations in your mourning for my father’s death and for our country dear, I at my own nuptials
121
am making this torch to blaze and show its light, giving to you, O Hymen, giving, O Hecate, a light, at the maiden’s wedding, as the custom is.
122
Nimbly lift the foot; lead the dance on high, with cries of joy, as if to greet my father’s happy fate. The dance is sacred. Come, Phoebus, now, for it is in your temple
123
among your bay-trees that I minister. Hail Hymen, god of marriage! Hymen, hail! Dance, mother, and laugh! link your steps with me, and circle in the delightful measure, now here, now there.
124
Salute the bride on her wedding-day with hymns and cries of joy. Come, you maids of Phrygia in fair raiment, sing my marriage
125
with the husband fate ordains that I should wed.
126
126
Chorus Leader
126
Hold the frantic maiden, royal mistress, lest with nimble foot she rush to the Argive army.
127
127
Hecuba
127
You god of fire, it is yours to light the bridal torch for men, but piteous is the flame you kindle here,
128
beyond my blackest expectation. Ah, my child! how little did I ever dream that such would be your marriage, a captive, and of Argos too! Give up the torch to me; you do not bear its blaze aright in your wild frantic course, nor have your afflictions left you in your sober senses,
129
but still you are as frantic as before. Take in those torches, Trojan friends, and for her wedding madrigals weep your tears instead.
130
130
Cassandra
130
O mother, crown my head with victor’s wreaths; rejoice in my royal match; lead me
131
and if you find me unwilling at all, thrust me there by force; for if Loxias is indeed a prophet, Agamemnon, that famous king of the Achaeans, will find in me a bride more vexatious than Helen. For I will slay him and lay waste his home
132
to avenge my father’s and my brothers’ death. But let that go; I will not tell of that axe which shall sever my neck and the necks of others, or of the conflict ending in a mother’s death, which my marriage shall cause, nor of the overthrow of Atreus’ house.
133
But I, for all my frenzy, will so far rise above my frantic fit, that I will prove this city happier far than those Achaeans, who for the sake of one woman and one passion have lost a countless army in hunting Helen.
134
Their captain too, whom men call wise, has lost for what he hated most what most he prized, yielding to his brother for a woman’s sake—and she was willing and not taken by force—the joy he had of his own children in his home. For from the day that they landed upon Scamander’s strand, their doom began,
135
not for loss of stolen frontier nor yet for fatherland with high towers; whomever Ares took, those never saw their children again, nor were they shrouded for the tomb by hand of wife, but in a foreign land they lie. At home the case was still the same;
136
wives were dying widows, parents were left childless in their homes, having reared their sons for others, and none is left to make libations of blood upon the ground before their tombs. Truly to such praise as this their army can make an ample claim. It is better to pass by their shame in silence, nor may mine be the Muse
137
to tell that evil tale.
138
But the Trojans were dying, first for their fatherland, fairest fame to win; whomever the sword took, all these found friends to bear their bodies home and were laid to rest in the embrace of their native land,
139
their funeral rites all duly paid by duteous hands. And all such Phrygians as escaped the warrior’s death lived always day by day with wife and children by them, joys the Achaeans had left behind. As for Hector and his griefs, hear how the case stands;
140
he is dead and gone, but still his fame remains as bravest of the brave, and this was a result of the Achaeans’ coming; for had they remained at home, his worth would have gone unnoticed. And Paris married the daughter of Zeus, whereas, had he never done so, the alliance he made in his family would have been forgotten.
141
Whoever is wise should fly from making war; but if he come to this, a noble death will crown his city with glory, a coward’s end with shame. Therefore, mother, you should not pity your country or my bed, for this my marriage
142
will destroy those whom you and I most hate.
143
143
Chorus Leader
143
How sweetly at your own sad lot you smile, chanting a strain, which, in spite of you, may prove you wrong!
144
144
Talthybius
144
Had not Apollo turned your wits to maenad revelry, you would not for nothing have sent my chiefs
145
with such ominous predictions forth on their way. But, after all, these lofty minds, reputed wise, are nothing better than those that are held as nothing. For that mighty king of all Hellas, dear son of Atreus, has yielded to a passion
146
for this mad maiden of all others; though I am poor enough, yet would I never have chosen such a wife as this. As for you, since your senses are not whole, I give your taunts against Argos and your praise of Troy to the winds to carry away. Follow me now
147
to the ships to grace the wedding of our chief. And you too follow, whenever the son of Laertes demands your presence, for you will serve a mistress most discreet, as all declare who came to Ilium.
148
148
Cassandra
148
A clever fellow, this servant! Why is it heralds hold
149
the name they do? All men unite in hating with one common hate the attendants of kings or governments. You say my mother shall come to the halls of Odysseus? Where then are Apollo’s words, so clear to me in their interpretation, which declare
150
that she shall die here? What else remains, I will not taunt her with. Unhappy Odysseus, he does not know the sufferings that await him; or how these ills I and my Phrygians endure shall one day seem to him precious as gold. For beyond the ten long years spent at Troy he shall drag out other ten and then come to his country all alone . . .
151
where dreadful Charybdis lurks in a narrow channel between the rocks; past Cyclops the savage shepherd, and Ligurian Circe who turns men to swine; shipwrecked often upon the salt sea-wave; longing to eat the lotus, and the sacred cattle of the sun,
152
whose flesh shall utter in the days to come a human voice, bitter to Odysseus. In brief, he shall descend alive to Hades, and, though he shall escape the waters’ flood, yet shall he find a thousand troubles in his country when he arrives.
153
153
Cassandra
153
Enough! why do I recount the troubles of Odysseus?
154
Lead on at once, that I may wed my husband for his home in Hades’ halls. Base you are, and basely shall you be buried, in the dead of night when day is done, you captain of that army of Danaids, who think so proudly of your fortune! Yes, and the rocky chasm with its flood of wintry waters shall give my corpse cast forth in nakedness to wild beasts to make their meal upon,
155
near my husband’s tomb, I, Apollo’s servant. O garlands of that god most dear to me! farewell, you mystic symbols! I here resign your feasts, my joy in days gone by. Go, I tear you from my body, that, while yet mine honor is intact, I may give them to the rushing winds to waft to you, my prince of prophecy!
156
Where is that general’s ship? Where must I go to take my place there? Lose no further time in watching for a favoring breeze to fill your sails, doomed as you are to carry from this land one of the three avenging spirits. Fare you well, mother! dry your tears. O dear country! my brothers below the earth and my own father,
157
it will not be long before you shall welcome me; victory shall crown my advent among the dead, when I have overthrown the home of our destroyers, the house of the sons of Atreus.
158
158
Chorus Leader
158
You guardians of the grey-haired Hecuba, see how your mistress is sinking speechless to the ground! Take hold of her! will you let her fall,
159
you worthless slaves? lift up again, from where it lies, her withered body.
160
160
Hecuba
160
Leave me, my maidens—unwelcome service does not grow welcome—lying where I fell; my sufferings now, my troubles past, afflictions yet to come, all claim this lowly posture. Gods of heaven! small help I find in calling such allies,
161
yet is there something in the form of invoking heaven, whenever we fall on evil days. First I will sing of my former blessings; so shall I inspire the greater pity for my present woes. Born to royal estate and wedded to a royal lord,
162
I was the mother of a race of gallant sons; no mere ciphers they, but Phrygia’s chiefest pride, children such as no Trojan or Hellenic or barbarian mother ever had to boast. All these have I seen slain by the spear of Hellas,
163
and at their tombs have I shorn off my hair; with these my eyes I saw their father, Priam, butchered on his own hearth, and my city captured, nor did others bring this bitter news to me. The maidens I brought up
164
to see chosen for some marriage high, for strangers have I reared them, and seen them snatched away. Nevermore can I hope to be seen by them, nor shall my eyes behold them ever in the days to come. And last, to crown my misery,
165
I shall be brought to Hellas, a slave in my old age. And there the tasks that least befit the evening of my life will they impose on me, Hector’s mother, to watch their gates and keep the keys, or bake their bread, and on the ground instead of my royal bed
166
lay down my shrunken limbs, with tattered rags about my wasted frame, a shameful garb for those who once were prosperous. Ah, woe is me! and this is what I bear and am to bear for one woman’s marriage!
167
O my daughter, O Cassandra! whom gods have summoned to their frenzied train, how cruel the lot that ends your virgin days! And you, Polyxena! my child of sorrow, where, oh! where are you? None of all the many sons and daughters I have born comes to aid a wretched mother.
168
Why then raise me up? What hope is left us? Guide me, who before trod so daintily the streets of Troy, but now am a slave, to a bed upon the ground, near some rocky ridge, that from there I may cast myself down and perish, after I have wasted my body with weeping.
169
Of all the prosperous crowd, count none a happy man before he die.
170
170
Chorus
170
Sing me, Muse, a tale of Troy, a funeral dirge in strains unheard as yet, with tears;
171
for now I will uplift for Troy a piteous chant, telling how I met my doom and fell a wretched captive to the Argives by reason of a four-footed beast that moved on wheels, when Achaea’s sons left at our.gates that horse,
172
loud rumbling to the sky, with its trappings of gold and its freight of warriors; and our people cried out as they stood upon the rocky citadel, Up now, you whose toil is over,
173
and drag this sacred image to the shrine of the Zeus-born maiden, goddess of our Ilium! Forth from his house came every youth and every grey-head too; and with songs of joy
174
they took the fatal snare within.
175
175
Chorus
175
Then hastened all the race of Phrygia to the gates, to make the goddess a present of an Argive band ambushed in the polished mountain-pine,
176
Dardania’s ruin, a welcome gift to be to her, the virgin queen of deathless steeds; and with nooses of cord they dragged it, as it had been a ship’s dark hull, to the stone-built
177
temple of the goddess Pallas, and set it on that floor so soon to drink our country’s blood. But, as they labored and made merry, came on the pitchy night; loud the Libyan flute was sounding,
178
and Phrygian songs awoke, while maidens beat the ground with airy foot, uplifting their glad song; and in the halls a blaze of torchlight shed its flickering shadows
179
on sleeping eyes.
180
180
Chorus
180
In that hour around the house I was singing as I danced to that maiden of the hills, the child of Zeus;
181
when there rang along the town a cry of death which filled the homes of Troy, and babies in terror clung about their mothers’ skirts,
182
as forth from their ambush came the warrior-band, the handiwork of maiden Pallas. Soon the altars ran with Phrygian blood, and desolation reigned over every bed where young men lay beheaded,
183
a glorious crown for Hellas won, for her, the nurse of youth, but for our Phrygian fatherland a bitter grief.
184
184
Chorus Leader
184
Hecuba, do you see Andromache advancing here on a foreign chariot?
185
and with her, clasped to her throbbing breast, is her dear Astyanax, Hector’s child. Where are you being carried, unhappy wife, mounted on that chariot, side by side with Hector’s brazen arms and Phrygian spoils of war,
186
with which Achilles’ son will deck the shrines of Phthia on his return from Troy?
187
187
Andromache
187
My Achaean masters are leading me away.
188
188
Hecuba
188
Ah me!
578b
578b
Andromache
578b
Why do you in note of woe utter the dirge that is mine?
189
189
Hecuba
189
Alas—
579b
579b
Andromache
579b
For these sorrows—
190
190
Hecuba
190
O Zeus—
580b
580b
Andromache
580b
And for this calamity.
191
191
Hecuba
191
O my children!
581b
581b
Andromache
581b
Our day is past.
192
192
Hecuba
192
Joy is gone, Troy is gone.
193
193
Andromache
193
Unhappy!
583b
583b
Hecuba
583b
For my gallant sons
194
194
Andromache
194
Alas!
584b
584b
Hecuba
584b
Alas indeed, for my
195
195
Andromache
195
Misery!
585b
585b
Hecuba
585b
Piteous the fate
196
196
Andromache
196
Of our city,
586b
586b
Hecuba
586b
Smouldering in the smoke.
271
271
Talthybius
271
Come, child, leave fond embracing of your woeful mother, and mount the high coronal of your ancestral towers,
272
there to draw your parting breath, as is ordained. Take him away. His should the duty be to do such herald’s work, whose heart knows no pity and who loves ruthlessness more than my soul does. Exeunt Andromache and Talthybius with Astyanax.
273
273
Hecuba
273
O child, son of my hapless boy, an unjust fate robs me and your mother of your life. How is it with me? What can I do for you, luckless one? For you I strike upon my head and beat my breast, my only gift;
274
for that is in my power. Woe for my city! woe for you! What sorrow do we not have? What is wanting now to our utter and immediate ruin?