“_O, ye have found an anguish that outstrips All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks! Why will ye slay this innocent, that seeks No wrong?_“[5] Her own wrongs, though deep and shameful, she could bear; but the cruelty to her child is insupportable. All the graciousness and dignity of her nature break down under it; and carried beyond herself, she calls down wild curses upon her conquerors, and upon Helen, the origin of all her woes. Then, suddenly realizing the futility of her rage and her powerlessness to save Astyanax, she yields him to the Herald in a poignant outburst of grief: “_Quick! take him: drag him: cast him from the wall, If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift! God hath undone me, and I cannot lift One hand, one hand, to save my child from death!_“[5] So Andromache was taken alone into captivity. Of all that befell her there we do not know; but there are hints and fragments which suggest that the gods must have relented a little, at sight of her misery. For long afterward, when the Trojan prince Æneas set out to found another Troy in Latium, he anchored his fleet one day in the bay of Chaonia. And there, as he wandered upon the shore, he found Andromache. Her cruel captor was dead; and she was married to Helenus, the brother of Hector. But she had not forgotten her hero-husband, and when Æneas and his companions came upon her first, she was paying devotions at his tomb: _Within a grove Andromache that day, Where Simois in fancy flowed again, Her offerings chanced at Hector’s grave to pay, A turf-built cenotaph, with altars twain, Source of her tears and sacred to the slain— And called his shade._[6] ----- Footnote 4: From Messrs Lang, Leaf, and Myers’s translation of the _Iliad_ (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.). 1909 Edition. Footnote 5: From Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the _Troades_ (George Allen and Co. Ltd.). Footnote 6: From E. Fairfax Taylor’s translation of the _Æneid_ (Everyman’s Library). _Homer: Penelope_ We come now to the _Odyssey_, the second Homeric epic; and to its heroine, wise Penelope. Nominally, we have left the _Iliad_ behind by a space of several years. Troy had fallen, and the Greeks were homeward bound, fewer in number and sadder at heart than when the fleet had sailed ten years before. Some few of them reached home in safety. But for the most part, the return voyages were only accomplished with tremendous hardship and peril; and many who had escaped death at Troy found it at the hands of Poseidon, earth-shaking sea-god. Of proud Agamemnon, and the fate that awaited him in his palace at Mycenæ, we shall hear presently. We are concerned now with the wanderings of Odysseus, and how he won home at last to the faithful love of Penelope.