[14] Talthybius is a loyal soldier with every wish to be kind.  But he is naturally in good spirits over the satisfactory end of the war, and his tact is not sufficient to enable him to understand the Trojan Women’s feelings.  Yet in the end, since he has to see and do the cruelties which his Chiefs only order from a distance, the real nature of his work forces itself upon him, and he feels and speaks at times almost like a Trojan.  It is worth noticing how the Trojan Women generally avoid addressing him. (Cf. pp. 48, 67, 74.)

[15] The haunted keys (literally, “with God through them, penetrating them").]—­Cassandra was his Key-bearer, holding the door of his Holy Place. (Cf. _ Hip_. 540, p. 30.)

[16] She hath a toil, &c.]—­There is something true and pathetic about this curious blindness which prevents Hecuba from understanding “so plain a riddle.” (Cf. below, p. 42.) She takes the watching of a Tomb to be some strange Greek custom, and does not seek to have it explained further.

[17] Odysseus.]—­In Euripides generally Odysseus is the type of the successful unscrupulous man, as soldier and politician—­the incarnation of what the poet most hated.  In Homer of course he is totally different.

[18] Burn themselves and die.]—­Women under these circumstances did commit suicide in Euripides’ day, as they have ever since.  It is rather curious that none of the characters of the play, not even Andromache, kills herself.  The explanation must be that no such suicide was recorded in the tradition (though cf. below, on p. 33); a significant fact, suggesting that in the Homeric age, when this kind of treatment of women captives was regular, the victims did not suffer quite so terribly under it.

[19] Hymen.]—­She addresses the Torch.  The shadowy Marriage-god “Hymen” was a torch and a cry as much as anything more personal.  As a torch he is the sign both of marriage and of death, of sunrise and of the consuming fire.  The full Moon was specially connected with marriage ceremonies.

[20] Loxias.]—­The name of Apollo as an Oracular God.

[21] 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.

[22] 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.

[23] 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.