Andromache
Polyxena is dead. They cut your daughter's throat to pleasure dead Achilles' corpse, above his grave.
Hecuba
O wretched. This was what Talthybius meant, that speech cryptic, incomprehensible, yet now so clear.
Andromache
I saw her die, and left this wagon seat to lay a robe upon her body and sing threnody.
Hecuba
Poor child, poor wretched, wretched darling, sacrificed, but without pity, and in pain, to a dead man.
Andromache
She is dead, and this was death indeed; and yet to die as she did was better than to live as I live now.
Hecuba
Child, no. No life, no light is any kind of death, since death is nothing and in life hope lives still.
Excerpt from my favorite Greek tragedy, Euripides' The Trojan Women (from Richard Lattimore's translation).
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