The Trojan Women

Euripides

Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Translated into English Prose from the Text of Paley. Vol. I. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1906.

  1. And yet it was by your mighty aid they sacked Ilium.
Athena
  1. For which cause I would join with you to do them harm.
Poseidon
  1. My powers are ready at your will. What is your intent?
Athena
  1. I will impose on them a return that is no return.
Poseidon
  1. While they stay on shore, or as they cross the salt sea?
Athena
  1. When they have set sail from Ilium for their homes. On them will Zeus also send his rain and fearful hail,
  2. and inky tempests from the sky; and he promises to grant me his thunder-bolts to hurl on the Achaeans and fire their ships. And you, for your part, make the Aegean strait to roar with mighty billows and whirlpools, and fill Euboea’s hollow bay with corpses,
  3. that Achaeans may learn henceforth to reverence my temples and regard all other deities.
Poseidon
  1. So shall it be, for this favor needs only a few words. I will vex the broad Aegean sea; and the beach of Myconos and the reefs round Delos,
  2. Scyros and Lemnos too, and the cliffs of Caphareus shall be strewn with many a corpse. You go to Olympus, and taking from your father’s hand his lightning bolts, keep careful watch against the hour when Argos’ army lets slip its cables.
  3. A fool is he who sacks the towns of men, with shrines and tombs, the dead man’s hallowed home, for at the last he makes a desert round himself and dies.
Hecuba
  1. Lift your head, unhappy one, from the ground; raise up your neck; this is Troy no more,
  2. no longer am I queen in Ilium. Though fortune change, endure your lot; sail with the stream, and follow fortune’s tack, do not steer your ship of life against the tide, since chance must guide your course.
  3. Ah me! ah me! What else but tears is now my hapless lot, whose country, children, husband, all are lost? Ah! the high-blown pride of ancestors, humbled! how brought to nothing after all!
  4. What woe must I suppress, or what declare? What plaintive dirge shall I awake? Ah, woe is me! the anguish I suffer lying here stretched upon this hard pallet!
  5. O my head, my temples, my side! How I long to turn over, and lie now on this, now on that, to rest my back and spine, while ceaselessly my tearful wail ascends.
  6. For even this is music to the wretched, to chant their cheerless dirge of sorrow.
Hecuba
  1. You swift-prowed ships, rowed to sacred Ilium over the deep dark sea,