The Trojan Women (595b-645)

O my country, O unhappy land—

I weep for you now left behind.

Now do you behold your piteous end.

And you, my house, where I gave birth.

O my children! bereft of her city as your mother is, she now is losing you. Oh, what mourning and what sorrow! . . .

oh, what endless streams of tears in our houses! The dead alone forget their griefs and never shed a tear.

What sweet relief to sufferers it is to weep, to mourn, lament, and chant the dirge that tells of grief!

Do you see this, mother of that man, Hector, who once laid low in battle many a son of Argos?

I see that it is heaven’s way to exalt what men accounted nothing, and ruin what they most esteemed.

Hence with my child as booty am I borne; the noble

are brought to slavery—a bitter change.

This is necessity’s grim law; it was just now that Cassandra was torn with brutal violence from my arms.

Alas, alas! it seems a second Aias has appeared to wrong your daughter; but there are other ills for you.

Yes, beyond all count or measure are my sorrows; evil vies with evil in the struggle to be first.

Your daughter Polyxena is dead, slain at Achilles’ tomb, an offering to his lifeless corpse.

O woe is me! This is that riddle Talthybius

long ago told me, a truth obscurely uttered.

I saw her myself; so I alighted from the chariot, and covered her corpse with a mantle, and struck upon my breast.

Alas! my child, for your unhallowed sacrifice! and yet again, alas! for your shameful death!

Her death was even as it was, and yet that death of hers was after all a happier fate than my life.

Death and life are not the same, my child; the one is annihilation, the other keeps a place for hope.

Hear, O mother of children! give ear to what I urge so well,

that I may cheer my drooping spirit. It is all one, I say, never to have been born and to be dead, and better far is death than life with misery. For the dead feel no sorrow any more and know no grief; but he who has known prosperity and has fallen on evil days

feels his spirit straying from the scene of former joys. Now that child of yours is dead as though she never had seen the light, and little she knows of her calamity; whereas I, who aimed at a fair repute, though I won a higher lot than most, yet missed my luck in life.

For all that stamps the wife a woman chaste, I strove to do in Hector’s home. In the first place, whether there is a slur upon a woman, or whether there is not, the very fact of her not staying at home brings in its train an evil name;