Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

As the Achaean fleet prepares to sail, Poseidon and Athena—once opposed over Troy—agree to wreck the return for Locrian Ajax’s violation of Cassandra at Athena’s altar. On the shore the captive women wait. Hecuba lies among the ruins; the chorus of Trojan women lament. The herald Talthybius announces the allotments: Cassandra to Agamemnon; Andromache to Neoptolemus; Hecuba to Odysseus; Polyxena already reserved for Achilles’ tomb. Cassandra enters frenzied with wedding torches, prophesying Agamemnon’s death and her own, and the sufferings still awaiting Odysseus—truth no one credits. Andromache appears with Astyanax; she learns Polyxena has been slaughtered, then hears the worse decree: the Greeks will hurl Hector’s son from the walls so no avenger grows up. She yields the child; Hecuba and the women receive his broken body for burial in Hector’s shield. Menelaus comes for Helen; Hecuba urges her death; Helen defends herself with the Judgment of Paris and divine compulsion; Menelaus promises punishment in Sparta (the play leaves the outcome bitter and uncertain). Troy is fired. Hecuba tries to rush into the flames, is held back, and led toward Odysseus’s ship as the city collapses. The *Troades* is less a single intrigue than a sequence of grief-panels—allotment, Cassandra’s vision, Andromache’s loss, Astyanax’s murder, Helen’s trial, the burning—summing the moral cost of victory.