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, 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 long 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, l. 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, l. 11, A steed marvellous.]--See below, on p. 36.
P. 12, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 132, Castor.]--Helen's brother: the Eurotas, the river of her
home, Sparta.
P. 18, l. 135, Fifty seeds.]--Priam had fifty children, nineteen of them
children of Hecuba (_Il._ vi. 451, &c.).
P. 22, l. 205, Pirene.]--The celebrated spring on the hill of Corinth.
Drawing water was a typical employment of slaves.
P. 22, l. 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 Peneues 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 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, l. 356, Loxias.]--The name of Apollo as an Oracular God.
Pp. 30-34, ll. 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 Erinyes (Furies) of his mother into madness and exile.
P. 30, l. 370, 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.
P. 31, ll. 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, l. 423, A wise queen.]--Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.
P. 33, l. 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. ([Greek: Ker-ukes] as though from [Greek: Ker]
the death-spirit, "the one thing abhorred of all mortal men.")
P. 33, l. 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 _Kunos-sema_, 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 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, l. 456, The wind comes quick.]--_i.e._ The storm of the Prologue.
Three Powers: the three Erinyes.
P. 36, l. 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 (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 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, l. 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, l. 554, To Artemis.]--Maidens at the shrine of Artemis are a
fixed datum in the tradition. (Cf. _Hec._ 935 ff.)
P. 39 ff., l. 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, l. 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 ([Greek: Andro-mache]="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.
P. 51, l. 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_, l. 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, l. 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, l. 884, Thou deep base of the world.]--These lines, as a piece of
religious speculation were very famous in antiquity. And dramatically
they 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, l. 922, The firebrand'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.