Trojan War

So ingrained in our nature is our hostility to them that even in the matter of our stories we linger most fondly over those which tell of the Trojan and the Persian wars, because through them we learn of our enemies’ misfortunes;

Moreover, I think that even the poetry of Homer has won a greater renown because he has nobly glorified the men who fought against the barbarians, and that on this account our ancestors determined to give his art a place of honor in our musical contests and in the education of our youth, in order that we, hearing his verses over and over again, may learn by heart the enmity which stands from of ol …

For if those who made war against an Alexander and took a single city were accounted worthy of such praise, what encomiums should we expect these men to win who have conquered the whole of Asia?

but no longer, since Troy is wholly destroyed and she has provided her name to the gods;

Chorus:

Chorus:

O my home, some joy I feel to see you again on my return from Troy, but I also grieve at the sight;

I ought to have a little wrong-doing from you to requite that evil, for my father Agamemnon also did wrong in gathering the Hellenes and going to Ilium, not that he had sinned himself, but he was trying to find a cure for the sin and wrong-doing of your wife.

For referring the sin as I do to Phoebus, I incur no pollution by addressing you; and yet I am truly sorry for the death of my sister Clytemnestra, whom I never saw after I was driven by heaven-sent frenzy to sail as I did to Ilium;

but the Trojans gave the same testimony then and later, sworn and unsworn:

Yet, although getting this, Menelaus was guilty of injustice toward the Egyptians.

After the rape of Helen, a great force of Greeks came to the Trojan land on Menelaus ' behalf.

and Argos, Agamemnon, who was possessed, not of one or two of the virtues merely, but of all which anyone can name— and these, not in moderate, but in surpassing degree.

And no one will be found, among those who rose to fame in his time or in later generations, to have accomplished an expedition more honorable than this or more advantageous to the Hellenes.

There is, moreover, connected with the above achievement one which, though less significant than those which I have mentioned, is more important and more deserving of mention than those which have been extolled again and again.

And from the capture of Troy to the return of Aeneas and the founding of Lavinium, ten years;

From the Trojan matters to the birth of Homer is, according to Philochorus, a hundred and eighty years, after the Ionian colony.

From Inachus to the time of the Trojan War twenty generations, or one more, are reckoned, and, so to speak, four hundred years and beyond.

The Acamantidae did not fail to recall the epics in which Homer says that Acamas sailed for Troy for the sake of his mother Aethra.

For I say that with good reason those men might be judged so far superior to those who campaigned against Troy, that the latter, the foremost princes out of the whole of Greece, with difficulty captured a single stronghold of Asia after besieging it for ten years, whereas those men single-handed not only repulsed a host assembled from an entire continent, which had already subdued all other lands, …

And ten years he sat warring at Troy, there again flattering the leaders of the army, both he and his brother;

From Ilium and the toils of Troy.

Did you take Troy and capture the famous Helen?

Aye, and we destroyed the whole family of Priam.

And with me my father sent much gold by stealth, so that, if ever Ilium’s walls should fall, his children that survived might not want for means to live.

alas for my ancestors, and my country which is falling in smouldering ruin among the smoke, sacked by the Argive spear, while I upon a foreign shore am called a slave, indeed!

Hecuba, I have hastened away to you, leaving my master’s tent, where the lot assigned me as his slave, when I was driven from the city of Ilium, hunted by Achaeans at the point of the spear;

Orestes:

Iphigenia:

Perhaps you know Troy, whose fame is everywhere.

"Son of Atreus," it said, "we used to say that Zeus had loved you better from first to last than any other hero, for you were leader over many and brave men, when we were all fighting together in the dêmos of the Trojans;

Are we not convinced that we should see, greeting Leosthenes with wonder, those of the so-called demi-gods who sailed against Troy:

Apart from the arts and philosophic studies and all the other benefits which one might attribute to her and to the Trojan War, we should be justified in considering that it is owing to Helen that we are not the slaves of the barbarians.

So great a passion for the hardships of that expedition and for participation in it took possession not only of the Greeks and the barbarians, but also of the gods, that they did not dissuade even their own children from joining in the struggles around Troy;

on the contrary, the Trojans allowed their cities to be laid waste and their land to be ravaged, so as to avoid yielding Helen to the Greeks, and the Greeks chose rather, remaining in a foreign land to grow old there and never to see their own again, than, leaving her behind, to return to their fatherland.

Merely because those races of mankind

In other, of some region of the world.

Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast,

And again, in the fight long ago before the walls of Dardanus, Corinthians seemed to decide the issue of battles on either side:

The first claim to authority for these instruments is asserted by their extreme antiquity.

that the gods clashed in battle among themselves for the Trojans and the Achaeans, like matched pairs of gladiators;

But Menelaus at once pursues the lost one, at once demands back the snatched one, wrings her out by a ten years' war, not lurking, not deceiving, not given to caviling.

And the reason was not so much scarcity of men as want of money.

at any rate he has made no mention of the size of any others in the catalogue of the ships.

And being now more in this state of things, some time after they made the expedition against Troy.