back on Hector's Andromache? is it Pyrrhus' bed you are still tending?' She dropped her eyes, and spoke with bated breath:—'O blest pre-eminently over all, Priam's virgin daughter,[o] bidden to die at the grave of her foe, under Troy's lofty walls! she that had not to brook the 5 chance of the lot, or, a slave and a captive, to touch the bed of her lord and conqueror! While we, after the burning of our city, carried over this sea and that, have stooped to the scorn, the youthful insolence of Achilles' heir, the slave-mother of his child; he, after this, goes in quest of 10 Leda's Hermione[o] and her Spartan alliance, and gives me over to Helenus, the bondwoman to be the bondman's mate! Him, however, Orestes, fired by desperate passion for a ravished bride, and maddened by the frenzy-fiend of crime, surprises at unawares, and slays at his sire's own 15 altar. At Neoptolemus' death a portion of this kingdom passed to Helenus, who called the fields Chaonian, and the land itself Chaonia, from Chaon, their Trojan namesake, and crowned, as you see, these heights with a new Pergamus, the citadel of Ilion. But you—what wind, 20 what destiny has shaped your voyage? What god has driven you on a coast which you know not to be ours? What of the boy Ascanius? is he alive and breathing upper air? he, whom you on that night at Troy—say, can his boyish mind feel yet for the mother he has lost? 25 Is he enkindled at all to the valour of old days, the prowess of a grown man, by a father like Æneas, an uncle like Hector?'
"Such were the sorrows she kept pouring out, weeping long and fruitlessly, when Priam's noble son, Helenus, 30 presents himself from the city, with a train of followers, and knows his friends again, and joyfully leads them to his home, many a tear interrupting his utterance. As I go on, I recognize a miniature Troy, a Pergamus copied from the great one, a dry rivulet the namesake of Zanthus, 35 and throw my arms round a Scæan[o] gate. My Trojan comrades, too, are made free of the friendly town. The king made entertainment for them in spacious cloisters.
