Whereby his house is left him desolate.[[4]]
CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE
Lord Leighton
By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co. 133 New Bond St. W.
But when the poor insulted body was at last recovered, all the city went out to meet it and bring it in with lamentation. Andromache led the women, wailing in her grief: “Husband, thou art gone young from life, and leavest me a widow in thy halls. And the child is yet but a little one, child of ill-fated parents, thee and me; nor methinks shall he grow up to manhood, for ere then shall this city be utterly destroyed. For thou art verily perished who didst watch over it, who guardest it and keptest safe its noble wives and infant little ones. These soon shall be voyaging in the hollow ships, yea and I too with them, and thou, my child, shalt either go with me unto a place where thou shalt toil at unseemly tasks, labouring before the face of some harsh lord, or else some Achaian will take thee by the arm and hurl thee from the battlement, a grievous death.... And woe unspeakable and mourning hast thou left to thy parents, Hector, but with me chiefliest shall grievous pain abide. For neither didst thou stretch thy hands to me from a bed in thy death, neither didst speak to me some memorable word that I might have thought on evermore as my tears fall night and day.”[[4]]
Andromache’s foreboding was only too completely fulfilled, for although Homer does not tell us of it, we know that when the truce for Hector’s funeral was over, Troy fell into the hands of the Greeks. The horrors of that day are related over and over again by the poets—the ruthless massacre of Priam and his sons, the capture of the women and children and the burning of the city. Euripides tells us in his Troades what befell Andromache. This drama, written centuries after the Iliad, has been called by Professor Gilbert Murray, “the first great expression of pity for mankind in European literature.” The subject was, indeed, one to evoke profoundest pity, and the poet, reflective and humane, seems to select it purposely to reveal the dreadful underside of war. He brings the figure of Hecuba upon the stage, weighed down under innumerable woes: Cassandra, too, in a dark prophetic frenzy, foretelling her own doom and that of Agamemnon: Helen, confronted at last by Menelaus; and Andromache, borne in the chariot of her captor, with the baby Astyanax in her arms.
Leader of Chorus. O most forlorn
Of women, whither go’st thou, borne
Mid Hector’s bronzen arms, and piled
Spoils of the dead, and pageantry
Of them that hunted Ilion down?
Andromache. Forth to the Greek I go,
Driven as a beast is driven.
Hecuba. Woe! Woe!...
Andromache. Mother of him of old, whose mighty spear
Smote Greeks like chaff, see’st thou what things are here?
Hecuba. I see God’s hand, that buildeth a great crown
For littleness, and hath cast the mighty down....