Play by Euripides. It is in GB Volume 5. Newsletter post: https://www.readgreatbooks.info/p/great-books-ep-82-euripides-the-trojan

The Trojan Women

Metadata

People in the play

Poseidon, Athena, Hecuba, Chorus of Captive Trojan Women, Talthybius, Cassandra, Andromache, Menelaus, Helen

Highlights

  • A fool is he who sacks the towns of men, with shrines and tombs, the dead man’s hallowed home, for at the last he makes a desert round himself, and dies. (View Highlight)
  • Oh! be it ours to come to Theseus’ famous realm, a land of joy! (View Highlight)
  • All men unite in hating with one common hate the servants who attend on kings or governments. (View Highlight)
  • Death and life are not the same, my child; the one is annihilation, the other keeps a place for hope. (View Highlight)
  • ne’er to have been born and to be dead, and better far is death than life with misery. For the dead feel no sorrow any more and know no grief; but he who has known prosperity and has fallen on evil days feels his spirit straying from the scene of former joys. (View Highlight)
  • For all that followed I must question my own heart, not thee; what frantic thought led me to follow the stranger from thy house, traitress to my country and my home? Punish the goddess, show thyself more mighty e’en than Zeus, (View Highlight)
  • Thy eye was fixed on Fortune, and by such practice wert thou careful to follow in her steps, careless of virtue’s cause. (View Highlight)
  • for every sensual act that men commit, they lay upon this goddess, and rightly does her name of Aphrodite begin the word for “senselessness”; (View Highlight)
  • Dear mouth, so often full of words of pride, death hath closed thee, and thou hast not kept the promise thou didst make, (View Highlight)
  • In vain did we sacrifice to them. Had not the god caught us in his grip and plunged us headlong ‘neath the earth, we should have been unheard of, nor ever sung in Muses’ songs, furnishing to bards of after-days a subject for their minstrelsy. (View Highlight)
  • And yet I deem it makes but little difference to the dead, although they get a gorgeous funeral; for this is but a cause of idle pride to the living. (View Highlight)