The Trojan Women Monologue
| The Trojan Women Monologue by Euripides | |
| Character: | Hecuba |
| Gender: | Female |
| Age (range): | ? |
| Style: | Drama |
| Length: | < 3 minutes |
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- HECUBA: Forbear, ye virgins; what was pleasing once
- Pleases no more: here let me lie thus fall'n,
- A fall that suits what I have suffered, what
- I suffer, and shall suffer. O ye gods,
- Unkind associates I indeed invoke,
- Yet when affliction rends the anguished heart,
- We with becoming grace invoke the gods
- First it is pleasing to me to recount
- My happier fortunes: thus my woes shall raise
- A stronger pity. Royal was my birth,
- And marriage joined me to a royal house;
- There I was mother of illustrious sons,
- Sons with superior excellence adorned
- Above the Phrygians; such no Trojan dame,
- No Grecian, no Barbarian e'er could boast;
- These I saw fall'n beneath the Grecian spear,
- And laid my several tresses on their tomb.
- For Priam too, their father, flowed my tears;
- His fate I heard not from report, but saw it,
- These eyes beheld him murdered at the altar
- Of Guardian Jove; my vanquished city stormed;
- My daughters, whom I nurtured high in hope
- Of choosing honourable nuptials for them,
- For others nurtured from my hands are rent;
- There is no hope that me they e'er shall see,
- And I shall never see them more. Th' extreme,
- The height of my afflicting ill is this:
- I to some house shall go a hoary slave,
- To some base task, most irksome to my age,
- Assigned; or at their doors to keep the keys
- A portress shall I wait, the mother once
- Of Hector, or to labour at the mill;
- For royal couches, on the ground to make
- My rugged bed; and o'er these worn-out limbs
- The tattered remnant of a worn-out robe,
- Unseemly to my happier state, to throw.
- Ah, for one woman's nuptial bed, what woes
- Are mine, and will be mine! Alas, my child,
- My poor Cassandra, madd'ning with the gods,
- By what misfortunes is thy purity
- Defiled? And where art thou, Polyxena,
- O thou unhappy! Thus of all my sons
- And all my daughters, many though they were,
- Not one is left to soothe my miseries.
- Why do you raise me, virgins? With what hope
- Lead you this foot, which once with stately port
- In Troy advanced, but now a slave, to seek
- A bed of leaves strewn on the ground, a stone
- My pillow, there to lie, to perish there
- Wasted with tears? Then deem not of the great
- Now flourishing as happy, ere they die.
Credits: Reprinted from The Plays of Euripides in English, vol. i. Trans. Shelley Dean Milman. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1920.
