LEADER.
Out on the smoke she goeth,
And her name no man knoweth;
And the cloud is northward, southward; Troy is gone
for ever!
[A great crash is heard, and the Wall is lost in
smoke and darkness.
HECUBA.
Ha! Marked ye? Heard ye? The crash
of the
towers that fall!
LEADER.
All is gone!
HECUBA.
Wrath in the earth and quaking and a flood that
sweepeth all,
LEADER.
And passeth on!
[The Greek trumpet
sounds.
HECUBA.
Farewell!—O spirit grey,
Whatso is coming,
Fail not from under me.
Weak limbs, why tremble ye?
Forth where the new long day
Dawneth to slavery!
CHORUS.
Farewell from parting lips,
Farewell!—Come, I and thou,
Whatso may wait us now,
Forth to the long Greek ships[49]
And the sea’s foaming.
[The trumpet sounds again, and the Women go out
in the darkness.
[1] Poseidon.]—In the Iliad Poseidon
is the enemy of Troy, here the friend. This sort
of confusion comes from the fact that the Trojans and
their Greek enemies were largely of the same blood,
with the same tribal gods. To the Trojans, Athena
the War-Goddess was, of course, their War-Goddess,
the protectress of their citadel. Poseidon, god
of the sea and its merchandise, and Apollo (possibly
a local shepherd god?), were their natural friends
and had actually built their city wall for love of
the good old king, Laomedon. Zeus, the great father,
had Mount Ida for his holy hill and Troy for his peculiar
city. (Cf. on p. 63.)
To suit the Greek point of view all this had to be
changed or explained away. In the Iliad
generally Athena is the proper War-Goddess of the
Greeks. Poseidon had indeed built the wall for
Laomedon, but Laomedon had cheated him of his reward—as
afterwards he cheated Heracles, and the Argonauts
and everybody else! So Poseidon hated Troy.
Troy is chiefly defended by the barbarian Ares, the
oriental Aphrodite, by its own rivers Scamander and
Simois and suchlike inferior or unprincipled gods.
Yet traces of the other tradition remain. Homer
knows that Athena is specially worshipped in Troy.
He knows that Apollo, who had built the wall with
Poseidon, and had the same experience of Laomedon,
still loves the Trojans. Zeus himself, though
eventually in obedience to destiny he permits the
fall of the city, nevertheless has a great tenderness
towards it.
[2] A steed marvellous.]—See below, on
p. 36.
[3] go forth from great Ilion, &c.]—The
correct ancient doctrine. When your gods forsook
you, there was no more hope. Conversely, when
your state became desperate, evidently your gods were
forsaking you. From another point of view, also,
when the city was desolate and unable to worship its
gods, the gods of that city were no more.
