Woe is me! my efforts are baffled; I am disappointed in my hope, anxious as I was to get my wife out of sight; foiled at every point,I form my plots and subtle schemes against my best-beloved. But I will go, in spite of all, with Calchas the priest, to inquire the goddess’s good pleasure, fraught with ill-luck as it is to me, and with trouble to Hellas.Lines 746-8 are rejected by Monk, whom most editors follow. He who is wise should keep in his housea good and useful wife or none at all.

ChorusThe Hellenes’ gathered army will come in arms aboard their ships to Simois with its silver eddies,to Ilium, the plain of Troy beloved by Phoebus; where Cassandra, I am told, wildly tosses her golden tresses, wreathed with crown of green laurel,whenever the god’s resistless prophecies inspire her.

ChorusAnd on the towers of Troy and round her walls shall Trojans stand, when sea-borne troopswith brazen shields row in on shapely ships to the channels of the Simois, eager to take Helen, the sister of that heavenly pair whom Zeus begot, from Priam, and bear her back to Hellas by toilof Achaean shields and spears.

ChorusThe son of Atreus, encircling Pergamus, the Phrygians’ town, with murderous wararound her stone-built towers, dragging Paris’s head backward to cut his throat and sacking the cityThe words πόλισμα Τροίας are omitted by Monk as a gloss on πόλιν. Hartung regards 11. 773-83 as interpolated, and there is certainly much in them that Euripides can scarcely have written; both Dindorf and Kirchhoff reject large portions of what follows 1. 773. from roof to base, shall be a cause of many tears to maids andPriam’s wife. And Helen, the daughter of Zeus, shallἐσεῖται. Hermann gives εἴσεται, shall know to her cost. weep in bitter grief because she left her lord.Never may there appear to me or to my children’s childrenthe prospect which the wealthy Lydian ladies and Phrygia’s brides will havePerhaps Tyrrwhitt’s σχήσουσι should be read for στήσουσι. as at their looms they converse:Tell me, who will pluck me away from my ruined country, tightening his grasp on lovely tresses till the tears flow? it is all through you, the offspring of the long-necked swan; if indeed it is a true reportthat Leda boreReading ἔτεκεν with Musgrave for ἔτυχεν. you to a winged bird, when Zeus transformed himself there, or whether, in the tablets of the poets, fables have carried these tales to men’s earsidly, out of season.

AchillesWhere is Achaea’s general? Which of his servants will announce to him that Achilles, the son of Peleus, is at his gates seeking him? For this delay at the Euripus is not the same for all of us;there are some, for instance, who, bing still unwed, have left their houses desolate and are idling here upon the beach, while others are married but without children;Reading καὶ παῖδας with Musgrave for ἄπαιδες. so strange the longing for this expedition that has fallen on their hearts by the will of the gods.τῆσδε στρατείας οὐκ ἄνευ θεῶν τινός. Hennig rejects 11. 805-9.My own just plea I must declare, and whoever else has any wish will speak for himself. Though I have left Pharsalia, and Peleus, still I lingerKirchhoff marks a lacuna of three lines after 1. 812 on the authority of one MS.; it is possible, however, that the passage is continuous, and an attempt has been made here to treat it as such. here by reason of these light breezes at the Euripus, restraining my Myrmidons, while they are always pressing on me,