“The south wind freshens in the sail; We hurry o’er the tide, Where’er the helmsman and the gale Conspire our course to guide; Now rises o’er the foamy flood Zacynthos, with its crown of wood, Dulichium, Samè, Neritos, Whose rocky sides the waves emboss; The crags of Ithaca we flee, Laertes’ rugged sovereignty; Nor in our flight forget to curse The land that was Ulysses’ nurse.” They landed on the coast of Leucadia, at Actium--the scene, be it remembered, of Augustus’s great naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra. Here, the Trojan chief takes care to say, he refreshed his weary crew with rest, and celebrated national games. Nay, he hung up there, fugitive as he was, a trophy of defiance--a shield which he had taken from a Greek hero, and inscribed upon it, “The spoil of Æneas from the conquering Argives.” So speaks the poet; his Roman audience would recognise the Actian games, celebrated there every fifth year by order of Augustus in honour of his great victory; and Æneas’s trophy is not so out of place as it might seem. At Buthrotus, in Epirus, the wanderers had met with old friends. Andromache is settled there, now the wife of Helenus, who, by a strange vicissitude, has become the successor of Neoptolemus in his Greek province. There is little of what we call sentiment in these “heroic” times, especially as concerns “woman and her master.” It grates upon the feelings of the reader who has in mind the pathetic scene between Hector and his wife in the Iliad of Homer, to be told here by the poet--told, too, as an ordinary incident, as in fact it was--that Andromache had become the property of the conqueror Neoptolemus, and that he, bent upon a marriage with Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus, had handed over his Trojan wife--“Hector’s Andromache,” as she still pathetically calls herself--to her fellow-captive Helenus, Hector’s brother. She tells her own sad story, not without some sense of its wretchedness-- “Ay--I am living; living still Through all extremity of ill.” And she envies the fate of Polyxena, her sister-in-law, slain on the tomb of Achilles. Still, she has accepted her lot--the lot of so many women in her day. And Helenus, her present lord, is (if that be any consolation) a sort of king; for Orestes has killed Neoptolemus, and Helenus has in some way succeeded him, and built a new “Pergamus” in Greece. So that here, too, the poet would tell us, Troy has conquered her conquerors--a son of Priam reigns in the territory of Achilles. But the impression made upon an English mind as to Andromache’s fate is, after all, that of degradation, and we gladly turn from the page which relates it.