[24] A wise queen.]—­Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.

[25] O Heralds, yea, Voices of Death.]—­There is a play on the word for “heralds” in the Greek here, which I have evaded by a paraphrase. ([Greek:  Kaer-ukes] as though from [Greek:  Kaer] the death-spirit, “the one thing abhorred of all mortal men.”)

[26] That in this place she dies.]—­The death of Hecuba is connected with a certain heap of stones on the shore of the Hellespont, called Kunossema, or “Dog’s Tomb.”  According to one tradition (Eur. Hec. 1259 ff.) she threw herself off the ship into the sea; according to another she was stoned by the Greeks for her curses upon the fleet; but in both she is changed after death into a sort of Hell-hound.  M. Victor Berard suggests that the dog first comes into the story owing to the accidental resemblance of the (hypothetical) Semitic word S’qoulah, “Stone” or “Stoning,” and the Greek Skulax, dog.  The Homeric Scylla (Skulla) was also both a Stone and a Dog (Pheneciens et Odyssee, i. 213).  Of course in the present passage there is no direct reference to these wild sailor-stories.

[27] The wind comes quick.]—­i.e..  The storm of the Prologue.  Three Powers:  the three Erinyes.

[28] ff., Chorus.]—­The Wooden Horse is always difficult to understand, and seems to have an obscuring effect on the language of poets who treat of it.  I cannot help suspecting that the story arises from a real historical incident misunderstood.  Troy, we are told, was still holding out after ten years and could not be taken, until at last by the divine suggestions of Athena, a certain Epeios devised a “Wooden Horse.”

What was the “device”?  According to the Odyssey and most Greek poets, it was a gigantic wooden figure of a horse.  A party of heroes, led by Odysseus, got inside it and waited.  The Greeks made a show of giving up the siege and sailed away, but only as far as Tenedos.  The Trojans came out and found the horse, and after wondering greatly what it was meant for and what to do with it, made a breach in their walls and dragged it into the Citadel as a thank-offering to Pallas.  In the night the Greeks returned; the heroes in the horse came out and opened the gates, and Troy was captured.

It seems possible that the “device” really was the building of a wooden siege-tower, as high as the walls, with a projecting and revolving neck.  Such engines were (1) capable of being used at the time in Asia, as a rare and extraordinary device, because they exist on early Assyrian monuments; (2) certain to be misunderstood in Greek legendary tradition, because they were not used in Greek warfare till many centuries later.  (First, perhaps, at the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium by Philip of Macedon, 340 B.C.)

It is noteworthy that in the great picture by Polygnotus in the Lesche at Delphi “above the wall of Troy appears the head alone of the Wooden Horse” (Paus. x. 26).  Aeschylus also (Ag. 816) has some obscure phrases pointing in the same direction:  “A horse’s brood, a shield-bearing people, launched with a leap about the Pleiads’ setting, sprang clear above the wall,” &c.  Euripides here treats the horse metaphorically as a sort of war-horse trampling Troy.