Troy

Give this girl, therefore, to the god, and if ever Zeus grants us to sack the city of Troy we will requite you three and fourfold.

He it was who had guided the Achaeans with their fleet to Ilion, through the prophesyings with which Phoebus Apollo had inspired him.

"Sons of Atreus," he cried, "and all other Achaeans, may the gods who dwell in Olympus grant you to sack the city of Priam, and to reach your homes in safety;

Tell me, O Muse, of that many-sided hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

You are indeed wonderfully like him about the head and eyes, for we were close friends before he set sail for Troy where the flower of all the Argives went also.

Phemios was still singing, and his hearers sat rapt in silence as he told the baneful tale of the homecoming [ nostos] from Troy, and the ills Athena had laid upon the Achaeans.

and he said that if men were so disposed, Troy would never have been taken, nor would Priam, the king of the Phrygians, descended from Zeus, have been slaughtered at the altar of Zeus.

I, then, as I learned from one of the priests in Egypt, a very old man at Onuphis, who laughed at the Greeks for many things as knowing nothing true about most matters, and most of all using this as proof, that they are persuaded that Troy was taken by Agamemnon and that Helen, while living with Menelaus, fell in love with Alexander;

For he said that he himself ruled all the rest, beginning from Troy as far as Ethiopia;

nor again must we permit our youth to hear what Aeschylus says— A god implants the guilty cause in men When he would utterly destroy a house, but if any poets compose a Sorrows of Niobe, the poem that contains these iambics, or a tale of the Pelopidae or of Troy, or anything else of the kind, we must either forbid them to say that these woes are the work of God, or they must devise some such inter …

Out on it, dear to my heart is the man whose pursuit around Troy-town I must behold with my eyes while my spirit is grieving within me, and:

And in this manner he has carried in nearly all the rest of his narration about affairs in Ilion, all that happened in Ithaca, and the entire Odyssey.

in their opinion, it was the taking of Troy which began their hatred of the Greeks.

but the Greeks, for the sake of a Lacedaemonian woman, recruited a great armada, came to Asia, and destroyed the power of Priam.

According to the reports, the expedition led by the sons of Atreus against Troy is also nothing by comparison;

and as Duris, from the capture of Troy to the crossing of Alexander into Asia, a thousand years.

from the capture of Troy to the return of the Heraclidae, eighty years;

So let them say that it was not Hector who burned the ships of the Greeks, but Achilles, because, being able to prevent Hector, he did not prevent him.

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

deliver the message, as you settle on Eurotas’ banks, that Menelaos has sacked the city of Dardanos, and will come home.

For I will not disgrace my Trojan fame, nor, on my return to Hellas, will I receive great blame—I who robbed Thetis of Achilleus, and saw the slaughter of Aias, son of Telamon, and the son of Neleus made childless;

In our perplexity, we asked Calchas, the seer, and he answered that we should sacrifice my own child Iphigenia to Artemis, whose home is in this land, and we would sail and sack the Phrygians’ capital.

The Hellenes’ gathered army will come in arms aboard their ships to Simois with its silver eddies, to Ilium, the plain of Troy beloved by Phoebus;

The son of Atreus, encircling Pergamus, the Phrygians’ town, with murderous war around her stone-built towers, dragging Paris’s head backward to cut his throat and sacking the city from roof to base, shall be a cause of many tears to maids and

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.

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

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;

while as for himself, he desired to go and offer sacrifice at Aulis, the place where Agamemnon had sacrificed before he sailed to Troy.

For he was able to say that his people were the only ones among the Greeks who had fought on the side of the King at Plataea, that they had never afterwards undertaken a campaign against the King, and that the Lacedaemonians had made war upon them for precisely the reason that they had declined to go with Agesilaus against him and had refused to permit Agesilaus to sacrifice to Artemis at Aulis, t …

Now Mindarus caught sight of the battle as he was sacrificing to Athena at Ilium, and hurrying to the sea he launched his triremes and set out, in order to pick up the ships under Dorieus.

But Cypris won the day by her deceitful promises, sweet-sounding words, but fraught with ruthless overthrow to Phrygia’s hapless town and Ilium’s towers.

For her sake, O Troy, did eager warriors, sailing from Hellas in a thousand ships, capture and make thee a prey to fire and sword;

for I have lived to see my husband Hector slain by Achilles, and the babe Astyanax, whom I bore my lord, hurled from the towering battlements, when the Hellenes sacked our Trojan home;

) To be sure, Ganymede whom I am carrying off from the halls of Dardanus.

Are ye the men who visited on Ilium, that bordereth on Scamander’s wave, the rape of Helen, worst of women?

From Ilium and the toils of Troy.

O ancient plain of land, the streams of Inachus, from which king Agamemnon once mounted war on a thousand ships and sailed to the land of Troy.

Oh, me, your bitter cleaving by the axe, father, the bitter plans of the way from Troy!

But as for your mother, Menelaus, who has arrived at Nauplia only now after capturing Troy, will bury her, with Helen helping him;

Now Hecuba, having discovered the death of her son, brought me here on the following pretext, saying she would tell me of hidden treasure stored up in Ilium by the race of Priam;

with many a backward look at my city, when the ship began her homeward voyage and parted me from Ilium’s strand;

No more, my native Ilium, shall you be counted among the towns never sacked;

For there lord Agamemnon mustered his expedition of a thousand ships of Hellas, wanting to take the crown of Troy in glorious victory and avenge the outrage to Helen’s marriage, doing this favor for Menelaus.

Perhaps you know Troy, whose fame is everywhere.

Iphigenia:

It is a cloudy but moonlight night on the plain before Troy.

O ancient City, O Ida’s daughter,

And men shall tell of thee, Ilion mine,

No longer keep the fire-brand idle in your hands, but launch the flame, that when we have destroyed the city of Ilium we may set forth in gladness on our homeward voyage from Troy.

It is this, it is this that fills me with anxious thought whether you, lord, seated on the sky, your heavenly throne, care at all that my city is destroyed, a prey to the furious fiery blast.

He sees them, but our mighty city is a city no more, and Troy’s day is done.

And laughter-loving Aphrodite put on all her rich clothes, and when she had decked herself with gold, she left sweet-smelling Cyprus and went in haste towards Troy, swiftly travelling high up among the clouds.

them bring him at once to windy Ilion.

For what words can match the measure of such men, who so far surpassed the members of the expedition against Troy that, whereas the latter consumed ten years beleaguering a single city they, in a short space of time, completely defeated the forces that had been collected from all Asia, and not only saved their own countries but liberated the whole of Hellas as well?

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 …

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;

Helenus then prophesied for them whatever matter they asked, and, pertaining to Troy, he foretold that they would never sack its towers, unless by winning words they should bring Philoctetes here from the island where he now dwells.

Surely he toils by the plan of some god so that he may not bend against Troy the invincible arrows divine, until the time be fulfilled at which, men say, by those arrows Troy is fated to fall.

With no great company I am homeward bound on my trader’s voyage from Ilium to Peparethus with its cluster-laden vines, but when I heard that the sailors were all of your crew, I resolved not to continue my voyage in silence, without first giving you my news and getting the due reward.

Led forth an army to Troy, plain beloved of the gods.

And fate has destined thee, Achilles, peer Of gods, to die beneath the wall of Troy’ s Proud lords, fighting for fair-haired Helen’ s sake.

For Achilles says somewhere in the course of his lament for the death of Patroclus, as recalling one of the greatest of sorrows, that unwillingly he has broken the promise he had given to Menoetius, the father of Patroclus;

We hold the grievous struggle of war and the disaster which Greece, by the divine will, brought upon Troy, and all the traces of things upon the wide lands.

Moreover, when I sent them to Troy in defence of Greece, I knew I was sending them to deadly war, not to a banquet.

\"All these I saw set ablaze, Priam's life reft from him by force, Jove's altar fouled with blood.

the high walls stand scorched, deformed, with the warped firwood —\" you know what follows, and that above all: