does not evil.  But do thou, my old attendant, taking an urn, fill it with sea water, and bring it hither, that I may wash my girl in her last bath, the bride no bride now, and the virgin no longer a virgin, wash her, and lay her out; according to her merits—­whence can I?  This I can not; but as I can, I will, for what can I do!  And collecting ornaments from among the captured women, who dwell beside me in these tents, if any one, unobserved by our new lords, has by her any stolen memorial of her home.  O state of my house, O mansions once happy!  O Priam, of vast wealth possessed, and supremely blest in thine offspring, and I too, this aged woman, the mother of such children!  How have we come to nothing, bereft of our former grandeur!  And yet still forsooth we are elated, one of us in his gorgeous palaces; another, when honored among his citizens.  These are nothing.  In vain the counsels of the mind, and the tongue’s boast.  He is most blest, to whom from day to day no evil happens.

Chorus.

Against me was it fated that calamity, against me was it fated that woe should spring, when Paris first hewed the pine in Ida’s forest, preparing to cut his way over the ocean surge to the bed of Helen, the fairest that the sun’s golden beams shine upon.  For toils, and fate more stern than toils, close us round:  and from the folly of one came a public calamity fatal to the land of Simois, and woes springing from other woes:  and when the dispute was decided, which the shepherd decided between the three daughters of the blessed Gods on Ida’s top, for war, and slaughter, and the desolation of my palaces.  And many a Spartan virgin at her home on the banks of the fair-flowing Eurotas sighs while bathed in tears:  and many an aged matron strikes her hand against her hoary head, for her children who have perished, and tears her cheek making her nails all blood-stained with her wounds.

Female attendant, chorus, Hecuba.

ATT.  O attendants, where, I pray, is the all-wretched Hecuba, who surpasses the whole race of man and woman kind in calamities? no one shall wrest from her the crown.

Chor.  But what dost thou want, O wretch, in thy words of ill omen? for thy messages of woe never rest.

ATT.  I bring this grief to Hecuba; but in calamity ’tis no easy thing for men to speak words of good import.

Chor.  And see, she is coming out of the house, and appears in the right time for thy words.

ATT.  O all-wretched mistress, and yet still more wretched than I can express in words, thou art undone, and no longer beholdest the light, childless, husbandless, cityless, entirely destroyed.

Hec.  Thou has said nothing new, but hast reproached me who already know it:  but why dost thou bring this corse of my Polyxena, whose sepulture was reported to me as in a state of active progress through the labors of all the Grecians?