And with thy gentle manners win his soul;
this with the hope that she may be the better able to rear up Astyanax to establish once more some day the walls and power of Troy.
But the heaviest stroke is yet to fall. Talthybius now enters and announces with much reluctance that Ulysses has prevailed upon the Greeks to demand the death of Astyanax for the very reason that he may grow up to renew the Trojan war. The lad is to be hurled from a still standing tower of Troy. The herald warns Andromache that if she resist this mandate she may be endangering the boy's funeral rites. She yields to fate, passionately caressing the boy, who clings fearfully to her, partly realizing his terrible situation. The emotional climax of the play is reached, as she says to the clinging, frightened lad:
Why dost thou clasp me with thy hands, why hold
My robes, and shelter thee beneath my wings
Like a young bird?
She bitterly upbraids the Greeks for their cruelty, and curses Helen as the cause of all her woe, and then gives the boy up in an abandonment of defiant grief:
Here, take him, bear him, hurl him from the height,
If ye must hurl him; feast upon his flesh:
For from the gods hath ruin fall'n on us.