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

And shout as they weep.
A little girl cries out,
“Mother, the Greeks are taking me away,
All alone, far from your eyes,
To a dark-blue ship with sea-faring oars
Off to holy Salamis,
Or the Isthmian heights that split two seas,
Where Pelops rules behind Lion gates.”
How I wish the double-pronged lightning, 1100
The thunder-bearing fire of the Aegean
Would strike the ship of Menelaus
As it sails on the high sea,
When he takes me from Troy to Greece
A slave weeping many a tear,
While Helen the daughter of Zeus
Holds her golden mirrors,
Those delights for young girls.
May he never reach his Grecian home,
Nor enter his ancestral hearth,
Nor walk in the streets of Pitana,
Nor enter the brazen-gated temple of the goddess,
Since he took her back, and by his rotten marriage,
Brought shame on great Greece
And untold misery to the streams of the Simois.
[Keening]
Io io.
New miseries pile up on the old for our land.
Unhappy Trojan wives, see our dead Astyanax,
Whom the Greeks threw pitilessly from the city’s towers;
Now his murderers bring him to us.
[Enter Talthybius, carrying the body of Astyanax on the shield of Achilles]
Talthybius
Hecuba, one last ship, manned with its oars,
is ready to take back to the shores of Phthia
the booty left behind for Achilles’ son.
Neoptolemus himself set sail because he heard
of his father Peleus’ new troubles: Acastus the son of Pelias
has exiled him. For that reason Neoptolemus did not delay,
but left quickly and took Andromache with him.
As she wept for her country and sobbed over the grave of her husband,
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