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 flames, 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[47], O wherefore fleëst thou,
Lord of the Phrygian, Father that made us?
'Tis we, thy children; shall no man aid us?
'Tis we, thy children! Seëst thou, seëst thou?
_Others_.
He seëth, 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[48], 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 long Greek ships[49]
And the sea's foaming.
[_The trumpet sounds again, and the Women go out in the darkness._
NOTES ON THE TROJAN WOMEN
[1] 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.
[2] A steed marvellous.]--See below, on p. 36.
[3] 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.
[4] Laotian 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.
[5] 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_.
[6] 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.
[7] 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.
[8]--Ajax the Less, son of Oïleus, 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.
[9] 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.)
[10] Castor.]--Helen's brother: the Eurôtas, the river of her home,
Sparta.
[11] Fifty seeds.]--Priam had fifty children, nineteen of them children
of Hecuba (_Il_. vi. 451, &c.).
[12] Pirênê.]--The celebrated spring on the hill of Corinth. Drawing
water was a typical employment of slaves.
[13] 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 Penêüs
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.
[14] 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.)
[15] 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.)
[16] 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.
[17] 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.
[18] 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.
[19] 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.
[20] Loxias.]--The name of Apollo as an Oracular God.
[21] 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 Erinyes
(Furies) of his mother into madness and exile.
[22] This their king so wise.]--Agamemnon made the war for the sake of
his brother Menelaus, and slew his daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice
at Aulis, to enable the ships to sail for Troy.
[23] 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.
[24] A wise queen.]--Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.
[25] 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.
([Greek: Kaer-ukes] as though from [Greek: Kaer] the death-spirit, "the
one thing abhorred of all mortal men.")
[26] 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
_Kunossêma_, 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 Hell-hound. M. Victor
Bérard 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 (_Phéneciens et Odyssée_, i.
213). Of course in the present passage there is no direct reference to
these wild sailor-stories.
[27] The wind comes quick.]--_i.e._. The storm of the Prologue. Three
Powers: the three Erinyes.
[28] 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 (1) 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 Polygnôtus in the Leschê
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.
[29] 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!
[30] To Artemis.]--Maidens at the shrine of Artemis are a fixed datum in
the tradition. (Cf. _Hec_. 935 ff.)
[31] 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.
[32] Even as the sound of a song.]--I have filled in some words which
seem to be missing in the Greek here.
[33]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 ([Greek:'Andro-machae]= "Man-fighting").
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.
[34] 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_, 1. 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? Ganymêdês 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 Tithônus, 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!"
[35] Pools of thy bathing.]--It is probable that Ganymêdês was himself
originally a pool or a spring on Ida, now a pourer of nectar in heaven.
[36] 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.