Euripides' THE TROJAN WOMEN Complete

Translated, with Explanatory Notes, by Gilbert Murray.

Euripides Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Euripides in Print

89 pages - You are on Page 44

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

Even as the sound of a song [32]
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 [33].

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

[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.

Previous Page / First / Next Page of The Trojan Women

Euripides Home Page ||| Elpenor's Free Greek Lessons
Aeschylus ||| Sophocles

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/euripides/trojan-women.asp?pg=44