women of troy Flashcards
they began
they began to die and they kept on dying
puddles of
Puddles of blood smear the sanctuaries of all the gods
When a town
When a town is destroyed, …all worship ceases…there’s no longer anything left worth a god’s consideration
I shall
I shall make the Greeks’ return home a disaster
When a man
When a man sacks a town… the same destruction, … will fall on his own head
This last
This last lottery of fate will be the end of me
Hecuba, whose
Hecuba, whose unnumbered tears match the numberless dead
the whole bay
The whole bay… with floating corpses so thick you could walk on them
On my
On my rack of pain, my bed of cold stone
Keep time
Keep time with the dirge I must sing now, the song of the dead, my threnody of tears
Whose misery
Whose misery is greater, the dead, whose day is passed, or the living, who must live in slavery?
Perhaps forced
Perhaps forced into the bed of some loathsome Greek
It cost
It cost them tens of thousands dead
Now their
Now their bodies lie forgotten in a foreign country
Any sensible
Any sensible man must hate war, he does his best to avoid it
For us
For us, vain dreaming, false hopes. The gods hate Troy
Ask the
Ask the goddess, not me, punish her
He sees
He sees, and does nothing
I knew
I knew… how to give in gracefully to his authority
A whole
A whole generation of women raped in their own bedrooms
I made it
I made it my business to be the perfect wife, never wanted even to leave his house,
I was raped
I was raped, not married. My life in Troy was the most abject slavery, nothing glorious about it
Exported
Exported, I was, sold off abroad, my exceptional beauty was a saleable asset for Greece!”
With one
With one look she makes men’s eyes her prisoners, she sacks whole cities, burns houses to the ground with that bewitching smile
This woman
This woman whose promiscuity shamed Greece
She’s a
She’s a wicked woman and she will endure a terrible death that will be a warning to all women in the future to be chaste and moral
Be pleasant
Be pleasant, make yourself attractive to him
We are loot
We are loot, my son and I, soldiers’ plunder
Ran away
Ran away and was unfaithful, because she wanted to
Other women
Other women will learn from her example that wives who betray their husbands must expect to die for it
Wives for
Wives for their husbands screaming, for their dead sons, daughters weeping desperately for mothers too old to live slaves for long
I, an
I, an old woman, with her city destroyed and all her children dead, must bury you, so much younger than I am, such a tender corpse
Teach me,
Teach me, gods of song, some harsh lament dissonant with tears and howls… invent new sounds for my grief
It comes
It comes to this: to leave my homeland, to leave my city, to watch them burning it to the ground
When the city
When the city is taken, and every Trojan fighting man lies dead, you have become terrified of a little child
