Trojan Women Quotes

It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialised as much as any other person.

We’re going to survive–our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams–and in their worst nightmares too.

Soon all of you immortals Will be as dead as we are! Come on then, what are you waiting for? Have you run out of thunderbolts?

I know better than to get in between three women arguing. If you’ll remember, the whole Trojan War started over that. (Wulf)

Revenge writing is a female genre. Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars. Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen.

That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.

She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

...I'd never want my muse to be a singer of nothing but disaster.

Oh, great king with your dreams of grandeur yet to come/ vile as you are so shall your end be.

Death cannot be what Life is, Child; the cup Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope.

Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!

And whatso man they call Happy, believe not ere the last day fall!

Human misery must somewhere have a stop:             there is no wind that always blows a storm;             great good fortune comes to failure in the end.

There liveth not in my life any more The hope that others have. Nor will I tell The lie to mine own heart, that aught is well Or shall be well…. Yet, O, to dream were sweet!

Menelaus, if you are really going to kill her, \ Then my blessing go with you, but you must do it now, \ Before her looks so twist the strings of your heart \ That they turn your mind; for her eyes are like armies, \ And where her glances fall, there cities burn, / Until the dust of their ashes is blown \ By her sighs. I know her, Menelaus, \ And so do you. And all those who know her suffer.

I swear to thee by Cupid's strongest bow, By his best arrow, with the golden head, By the simplicity of Venus' doves, By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves, And by that fire which burn'd the Carthage queen, When the false Trojan under sail was seen,— By all the vows that ever men have broke, In number more than ever women spoke,—

his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property.

Those who abuse their power never stay powerful long. Moderate governments survive.

Istam terra de fossam premat, gravisque terrus impio capiti incubet! (As for her, let her be buried deep in earth, and heavy may the soil lie on her unholy head.)

My legs are trembling, but I won't fall

necessity breaks even the strong.

The man who would prefer great wealth or strength             more than love, more than friends, is diseased of soul.

The end, the tale of what happened to the Trojan women when Troy fell, comes from a play by Sophocles’ fellow playwright, Euripides. It is a curious contrast to the martial spirit of the Aeneid. To Virgil as to all Roman poets, war was the noblest and most glorious of human activities. Four hundred years before Virgil a Greek poet looked at it differently. What was the end of that far-famed war? Euripides seems to ask. Just this, a ruined town, a dead baby, a few wretched women.

...sola est quies, mecum ruina cuncta si video abruta; mecum omnia abeant. Trahere cum pereas, libet. (...the only calm for me - if with me I see the whole universe o'erwhelmed in ruins; with me let all things pass away; 'tis sweet to drag others down when thou art perishing.)

Whatever her reasons, she determines to try to use her death for someone else’s good – the defence of the Trojans. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Priam, the king of Troy, offers her absolution for her crime.28 The word he uses is kathartheisa, ‘to cleanse’, from which we derive the word ‘catharsis’.

Conscience prevents the crimes that law allows.

What epitaph, I wonder, would a poet write for him?

No, child, you’re wrong. They’re not the same. Life means hope, death is nothing at all.

That man who feels safe in his blessings and rejoices is a fool.

when all fears of a possible worse thing are passed, there is in some sense peace and even glory.

An homecoming that striveth ever more And cometh to no home.

Helen of Troy's face started the Trojan war. Stupid as it is, Never forget the true power of your womanhood.

Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don't begin and end on a battlefield. If he truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren't just the ones who die. And that a death off the battlefield can be more noble (more heroic, if he prefers it that way) than one in the midst of fighting. But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property. My father did not hear me.

Tonight, no one will rage and cry: "My Kingdom for a horse!" No ghost will come to haunt the battlements of a castle in the kingdom of Denmark where, apparently something is rotten. Nor will anyone wring her hands and murmur: "Leave, I do not despise you." Three still young women will not retreat to a dacha whispering the name of Moscow, their beloved, their lost hope. No sister will await the return of her brother to avenge the death of their father, no son will be forced to avenge an affront to his father, no mother will kill her three children to take revenge on their father. And no husband will see his doll-like wife leave him out of contempt. No one will turn into a rhinoceros. Maids will not plot to assassinate their mistress, after denouncing her lover and having him jailed. No one will fret about "the rain in Spain!" No one will emerge from a garbage pail to tell an absurd story. Italian families will not leave for the seashore. No soldier will return from World War II and bang on his father's bedroom dor protesting the presence of a new wife in his mother's bed. No evanescent blode will drown. No Spanish nobleman will seduce a thousand and three women, nor will an entire family of Spanish women writhe beneath the heel of the fierce Bernarda Alba. You won't see a brute of a man rip his sweat-drenched T-shirt, shouting: "Stella! Stella!" and his sister-in-law will not be doomed the minute she steps off the streetcar named Desire. Nor will you see a stepmother pine away for her new husband's youngest son. The plague will not descend upon the city of Thebes, and the Trojan War will not take place. No king will be betrayed by his ungrateful daughters. There will be no duels, no poisonings, no wracking coughs. No one will die, or, if someone must die, it will become a comic scene. No, there will be none of the usual theatrics. What you will see tonight is a very simple woman, a woman who will simply talk...

Barb Miller Fri, Jun 21, 4:40 PM (3 days ago) to me How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live? She thinks of Maria, who owned so little and who left so quietly, and of Licinius telling her about the Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy for ten years, and of the Trojan women trapped inside, weaving and worrying, wondering whether they would ever walk the fields or swim in the sea again, or whether the gates would fall, and they would have to watch their babies be tossed over the ramparts to die.

Helen’s lament emphasizes Hector’s ability to see her as a human being, in a context when most of the Trojans were unable to do so. Implicitly, her lament for Hector is also a lament for the dehumanization, unkindness, and cruelty towards women, subordinates, and captives that are normalized in war, and will proliferate after the death of the city’s primary defender.

he truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren’t just the ones who die. And that a death off the battlefield can be more noble (more heroic, if he prefers it that way) than one in the midst of fighting. But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself. I will teach him this before he leaves my temple. Or he will have no poem at all.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

Wilder made history. Sealing her themes inside an unassailably innocent vessel, a novelistic Trojan horse for complex and ambiguous reactions to manifest destiny, wilderness, self-reliance, and changing views of women’s roles outside the home, her books have exercised more influence, across a wider segment of society, than the thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, which held that American democracy was shaped by settlers conquering the frontier. Their place in our culture continues to evolve.

Dear brother, it was your death I sealed in the oaths of friendship, setting you alone before the Achaians to fight with the Trojans. So, the Trojans have struck you down and trampled on the oaths sworn. Still the oaths and the blood of the lambs shall not be called vain, the unmixed wine poured and the right hands we trusted. 160  If the Olympian at once has not finished this matter, late will he bring it to pass, and they must pay a great penalty, with their own heads, and with their women, and with their children.

You’ll get all dusty.” He made a sound deep in his throat. “You can brush me off.” She grinned wickedly. “Now that’s what I call incentive!” He chuckled. “Cut it out. We’ve got a serious and sensitive situation here.” “So you intimated on the phone.” She glanced around the airport. “Where’s baggage claim? I brought some tools and electronic equipment, too.” “How about clothes?” She stared at him blankly. “What do I need with a lot of clothes cluttering up my equipment case? These are wash-and-wear.” He made another sound. “You can’t expect to go to a restaurant in that!” “Why not? And who’s taking me to any restaurant?” she demanded. “You never do.” He shrugged. “I’m going to do penance while we’re out here.” Her eyes sparkled. “Great! Your bed or mine?” He laughed in spite of himself. She was the only person in his life who’d ever been able to make him feel carefree, even briefly. She lit fires inside him, although he was careful not to let them show too much. “You never give up, do you?” “Someday you’ll weaken,” she assured him. “And I’m prepared. I have a week’s supply of Trojans in my fanny pack…” He managed to look shocked. “Cecily!” She shrugged. “Women have to think about these things. I’m twenty-three, you know.” She added, “You came into my life at a formative time and rescued me from something terrible. Can I help it if you make other potential lovers look like fried sea bass by comparison?” “I didn’t bring you out here to discuss your lack of lovers,” he pointed out. “And here I hoped you were offering yourself up as an educational experience,” she sighed. He glared down at her as they walked toward baggage claim. “Okay,” she said glumly. “I’ll give up, for now.

. . . As smoke from a hot fire looks dirty for a minute and then fades, as heavy clouds which we have glimpsed just now suddenly disappear with a puff of the cold North Wind, so flows away this breath which is our master. After death is nothing. Even death itself is nothing: just the finishing-line in the race. If you hunger for life, abandon hope. If you worry, let go fear. Hungry time and emptiness devour us. Death is a single whole: it kills our body and does not spare the soul. The realm of Taenarus, kingdom of cruel Hades, and the guard-dog Cerberus, fierce defender of the gate, are fictions, tall tales, empty fairy stories, myths, as close to the truth as a bad dream. Do you want to know where you will be after death? Where the unborn are.

And HECTOR died like everyone else He was in charge of the Trojans But a spear found out the little patch of white Between his collarbone and his throat Just exactly where a man's soul sits Waiting for the mouth to open He always knew it would happen He who was so boastful and anxious And used to nip home deafened by weapons To stand in full armour in the doorway Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running All women loved him His wife was Andromache One day he looked at her quietly He said I know what will happen And an image stared at him of himself dead And her in Argos weaving for some foreign woman He blinked and went back to his work Hector loved Andromache But in the end he let her face slide from his mind He came back to her sightless Strengthless expressionless Asking only to be washed and burned And his bones wrapped in soft cloths And returned to the ground

The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war crime, which most armies try to prevent and the rest deny and conceal. But for the heroes of the Iliad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war: women were to be enjoyed, monopolized, and disposed of at their pleasure. Menelaus launches the Trojan War when his wife, Helen, is abducted. Agamemnon brings disaster to the Greeks by refusing to return a sex slave to her father, and when he relents, he appropriates one belonging to Achilles, later compensating him with twenty-eight replacements. Achilles, for his part, offers this pithy description of his career: “I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women.”11 When Odysseus returns to his wife after twenty years away, he murders the men who courted her while everyone thought he was dead, and when he discovers that the men had consorted with the concubines of his household, he has his son execute the concubines too.

And the old man groaned, and beat his head With his hands, and stretched out his arms To his beloved son, Hector, who had Taken his stand before the Western Gate, Determined to meet Achilles in combat. Priam's voice cracked as he pleaded: "Hector, my boy, you can't face Achilles Alone like that, without any support— You'll go down in a minute. He's too much For you, son, he won't stop at anything! O, if only the gods loved him as I do: Vultures and dogs would be gnawing his corpse. Then some grief might pass from my heart. So many fine sons he's taken from me, Killed or sold them as slaves in the islands. Two of them now, Lycaon and Polydorus, I can't see with the Trojans safe in town, Laothoë's boys. If the Greeks have them We'll ransom them with the gold and silver Old Altes gave us. But if they're dead And gone down to Hades, there will be grief For myself and the mother who bore them. The rest of the people won't mourn so much Unless you go down at Achilles' hands. So come inside the wall, my boy. Live to save the men and women of Troy. Don't just hand Achilles the glory And throw your life away. Show some pity for me Before I go out of my mind with grief And Zeus finally destroys me in my old age, After I have seen all the horrors of war— My sons butchered, my daughters dragged off, Raped, bedchambers plundered, infants Dashed to the ground in this terrible war, My sons' wives abused by murderous Greeks. And one day some Greek soldier will stick me With cold bronze and draw the life from my limbs, And the dogs that I fed at my table, My watchdogs, will drag me outside and eat My flesh raw, crouched in my doorway, lapping My blood. When a young man is killed in war, Even though his body is slashed with bronze, He lies there beautiful in death, noble. But when the dogs maraud an old man's head, Griming his white hair and beard and private parts, There's no human fate more pitiable." And the old man pulled the white hair from his head, But did not persuade Hector.

Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-lilted cant that now passes for ‘advanced’ thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords (‘hermeneutics’, ‘transgressive’, ‘Lacanian’, ‘hegemony’, to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted ... Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the ‘real world’), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy)... And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit — a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.

Θνητῶν δέ μωρός ὅστις εὖ πράσσειν δοκῶν βέβαια χαίρει· τοῖς τρόποις γάρ αἱ τύχαι, ἔμπληκτος ὡς ἄνθρωπος, ἄλλοτ' ἄλλοσε πηδῶσι, κουδείς αὐτός εὐτυχεῖ ποτέ.

problems with approaches similar to yours. 10. Be a tempered radical. If your idea is extreme, couch it in a more conventional goal. That way, instead of changing people’s minds, you can appeal to values or beliefs that they already hold. You can use a Trojan horse, as Meredith Perry did when she masked her vision for wireless power behind a request to design a transducer. You can also position your proposal as a means to an end that matters to others, like Frances Willard reframing the right to vote as a way for conservative women to protect their homes from alcohol abuse. And if you’re already known as too extreme,

As always in the midst of crises, Romans reshaped their religion along the lines of their newly found identity. They were in part the descendants of Trojan Aeneas; their intellectual heritage was Greek. Pious Aeneas suited the Romans well. This wandering Trojan prince existed in the context of Greek myth, a framework the Romans had adopted and were propagating. Aeneas and the Romans shared the same mythological “Greekness.” Thus, the militarily successful Romans, armed with an acquired respectable and tangible past, began more intensively to encourage the literary arts, whose major proponent had been the Hellenistic world and whose guardian deity was Olympian Apollo.

The introduction of the Mater Magna (Great Mother) came on behalf of the Sibylline Books. The narrative surrounding the introduction, however, also shows the Romans consulting the Delphic Oracle, Greece’s most prestigious oracular shrine. By the end of the third century BCE, before Greece’s actual political subjugation to Rome, the Romans strove to define themselves within a Greek cultural context. Mater Magna linked Rome to its Trojan heritage but, at the same time, emphasized as well as encapsulated the unique relationship Rome had with its Greek cultural heritage. The Romans embraced Greek culture, and while this embrace generated Latin literature, it never incited a redefinition of the political Rome.

When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king's daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property.

You stupid, bestial mortals Making war, burning cities, Violating tombs and temples, Torturing your enemies, Bringing suffering on yourselves, Can't you see War Will kill all of you?

Aben sighed. "Trojans, like Achaeans, keep their women safe at home, though I for one can't understand such foolishness; those who women ride and fight have twice as many warriors.

Iphigenia turns to her bereft mother, Clytemnestra, and reshapes her death as a sacrifice on behalf of Greece, called here Hellas: Listen, mother, to what I have been thinking. I have decided to die. I want to do this gloriously, by yielding and doing away with my low-mindedness. Come, mother, look at it with my eyes and see how nobly I speak. All of majestic Hellas looks upon me now. It is through me that the ships will be able to sail and the Phrygians [that is, the Trojans] will find their grave. And if barbarians do something to women in the future, it is through me that they will be prevented from seizing them from happy Hellas. . . . All this I will secure by dying, and mine will be the blissful glory that I brought Hellas freedom. . . . I offer my body for Hellas. Sacrifice me and destroy Troy. That will be my monument for ages to come. That will be my children, my husband, my glory.9

Even if Helen and Paris had resisted the power of Aphrodite (which Zeus himself can’t manage), then war would still have come between east and west, Greece and Troy, because the gods had already decided that it was necessary. And this idea, that the war was fought irrespective of Helen, is one which ancient writers played around with. Not least, Euripides. In his play Helen, he presents a very different version of Helen’s story from the one we see in The Trojan Women. Helen was first performed in 412 BCE,23 three years after The Trojan Women, which had asked so many unsettling questions about the nature of war and the devastation it wreaks on the lives of victims and victors alike.

CASSANDRA: Down to the dead I go victorious, ruining the house of Atreus that ruined us.