1 EURIPIDES' TROJAN WOMEN PREFACE, TRANSLATION, and ...

Poseidon
I’ll do it. This favor needs no long speech. I shall make the Aegean
seethe with storms; the shores of Myconos, and the Delian shoals,
Skyros and Lemnos, and the Capherean headlands will be littered
with corpses of the many dead. Go to Olympus and get the
thunderbolts from your father’s own hands, and watch for the hour
when the Greek army cast off their ropes and set sail.
People are mad to sack cities, temples, and tombs,
those holy places for the dead; those who send others into
darkness will soon enough end their own brief day in night.
[Exeunt gods]
Hecuba
Lift up your unhappy head,
Raise your neck from the ground,
Troy is no more, no more do we rule. 100
Accept the changes destiny brings,
Sail with the stream, flow with fate,
Don’t oppose the waves of life,
Just sail on the sea of chance.
[Keening, beating her breast with grief]
Aiai Aiai.
What is left but my song of sorrow,
Lost my country, children, and husband?
The sail is trimmed now,
Those pretensions of noble ancestors,
And now I see you were nothing.
Why should I be silent? Or not silent?
Why should I weep?
In pain I lie on this bed of doom,
My back stretched on hard stone.
My head hurts, my temples, my sides,
I turn this way and that,
Trying to ease my back, again and again,
Keeping time with my ceaseless song of sorrow.
This is the muse for those in despair,
That sings their destruction, a song without dance.
From Greece’s safe harbours,
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