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Notes Display Latin text Display Dutch text | Ovid XIII Chapter 4: 399-428 The fall of Troy | Next chapter Return to index Previous chapter |
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Ulysses, the winner, set sail for Lemnos, the island of Queen Hypsipyle and her father the famous Thoas, a country notorious in ancient times for the murder by its women of their men, to bring back the arrows of Tirynthian Hercules. When he had brought them back to the Greeks, with Philoctetes their master, the last hand was dealt in the long drawn-out war. Troy fell, and Priam also. Hecuba, Priam's unhappy wife, when all else was lost, lost her human form, and filled the air of an alien country, where the long Hellespont narrows to a strait, with strange barking. Ilium burned; the flames had not yet died down; Jove's altar was soaking up old Priam's meagre stream of blood; and Cassandra, the head priestess of Apollo, dragged along by her hair, stretched out her arms uselessly to the heavens. The Dardanian women, embracing the statues of their nation's gods while they still could, and thronging the burning temples, were snatched away by the victorious Greeks as enviable prizes. Astyanax, was thrown down from that tower, from which he used to see his father, Hector, whom Andromache his mother pointed out to him, as Hector fought for him, and protected the ancestral kingdom. Now Boreas, the north wind, urged the Greeks on their way, and the sails flapped in a favourable breeze. The sailers are ordered to take advantage of the wind. The Trojan women wail, kissing their native earth, abandoning the burning houses: 'Troy, farewell! We are taken against our will.' The last to embark - pitiable sight! - was Hecuba, found among the tombs of her sons. There as she clung to their graves, trying to kiss their relics, the hands of Dulichian Ulysses dragged her away. Yet she emptied one sepulchre, and carried away with her, at her breast, Hector's ashes from the emptied urn. And on Hector's grave she left a scant offering to the dead, shreds of her grey hair, hair and tears. Events: Trojan war, middle part, Odysseus and Philoctetes, The fall of Troy |