P. 30, l. 356, Loxias.]—The name of Apollo as an Oracular God.
Pp. 30-34, ll. 360-460, Cassandra's visions.]—The allusions are to the various sufferings of Odysseus, as narrated in the Odyssey, and to the tragedies of the house of Atreus, as told for instance in Aeschylus' Oresteia. Agamemnon together with Cassandra, and in part because he brought Cassandra, was murdered—felled with an axe—on his return home by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Their bodies were cast into a pit among the rocks. In vengeance for this, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, committed "mother-murder," and in consequence was driven by the Erinyes (Furies) of his mother into madness and exile.
P. 30, l. 370, This their king so wise.]—Agamemnon made the war for the sake of his brother Menelaus, and slew his daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice at Aulis, to enable the ships to sail for Troy.
P. 31, ll. 394, 398, Hector and Paris.]—The point about Hector is clear, but as to Paris, the feeling that, after all, it was a glory that he and the half-divine Helen loved each other, is scarcely to be found anywhere else in Greek literature. (Cf., however, Isocrates' "Praise of Helen.") Paris and Helen were never idealised like Launcelot and Guinevere, or Tristram and Iseult.
P. 32, l. 423, A wise queen.]—Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.
P. 33, l. 425, O Heralds, yea, Voices of Death.]—There is a play on the word for "heralds" in the Greek here, which I have evaded by a paraphrase. (Κήρ-υκες [Greek: Kêr-ukes] as though from Κὴρ [Greek: Kêr] the death-spirit, "the one thing abhorred of all mortal men.")
P. 33, l. 430, That in this place she dies.]—The death of Hecuba is connected with a certain heap of stones on the shore of the Hellespont, called Kunos-sêma, or "Dog's Tomb." According to one tradition (Eur. Hec. 1259 ff.) she threw herself off the ship into the sea; according to another she was stoned by the Greeks for her curses upon the fleet; but in both she is changed after death into a sort of Hell-hound. M. Victor Bérard suggests that the dog first comes into the story owing to the accidental resemblance of the (hypothetical) Semitic word S'qoulah, "Stone" or "Stoning," and the Greek Skulax, dog. The Homeric Scylla (Skulla) was also both a Stone and a Dog (Phéniciens et Odyssée, i. 213). Of course in the present passage there is no direct reference to these wild sailor-stories.
P. 34, l. 456, The wind comes quick.]—i.e. The storm of the Prologue. Three Powers: the three Erinyes.
P. 36, l. 511 ff., Chorus.]—The Wooden Horse is always difficult to understand, and seems to have an obscuring effect on the language of poets who treat of it. I cannot help suspecting that the story arises from a real historical incident misunderstood. Troy, we are told, was still holding out after ten years and could not be taken, until at last by the divine suggestions of Athena, a certain Epeios devised a "Wooden Horse."
What was the "device"? According to the Odyssey and most Greek poets, it was a gigantic wooden figure of a horse. A party of heroes, led by Odysseus, got inside it and waited. The Greeks made a show of giving up the siege and sailed away, but only as far as Tenedos. The Trojans came out and found the horse, and after wondering greatly what it was meant for and what to do with it, made a breach in their walls and dragged it into the Citadel as a thank-offering to Pallas. In the night the Greeks returned; the heroes in the horse came out and opened the gates, and Troy was captured.