and his
tact is not sufficient to enable him to understand the Trojan Women's
feelings. Yet in the end, since he has to see and do the cruelties which
his Chiefs only order from a distance, the real nature of his work
forces itself upon him, and he feels and speaks at times almost like a
Trojan. It is worth noticing how the Trojan Women generally avoid
addressing him. (Cf. pp. 48, 67, 74.)

[15] The haunted keys (literally, "with God through them, penetrating
them").]--Cassandra was his Key-bearer, holding the door of his Holy
Place. (Cf. _ Hip_. 540, p. 30.)

[16] She hath a toil, &c.]--There is something true and pathetic about
this curious blindness which prevents Hecuba from understanding "so
plain a riddle." (Cf. below, p. 42.) She takes the watching of a Tomb to
be some strange Greek custom, and does not seek to have it explained
further.

[17] Odysseus.]--In Euripides generally Odysseus is the type of the
successful unscrupulous man, as soldier and politician--the incarnation
of what the poet most hated. In Homer of course he is totally different.

[18] Burn themselves and die.]--Women under these circumstances did
commit suicide in Euripides' day, as they have ever since. It is rather
curious that none of the characters of the play, not even Andromache,
kills herself. The explanation must be that no such suicide was recorded
in the tradition (though cf. below, on p. 33); a significant fact,
suggesting that in the Homeric age, when this kind of treatment of women
captives was regular, the victims did not suffer quite so terribly under
it.

[19] Hymen.]--She addresses the Torch. The shadowy Marriage-god "Hymen"
was a torch and a cry as much as anything more personal. As a torch he
is the sign both of marriage and of death, of sunrise and of the
consuming fire. The full Moon was specially connected with marriage
ceremonies.

[20] Loxias.]--The name of Apollo as an Oracular God.

[21] Cassandra's visions.]--The allusions are to the various sufferings
of Odysseus, as narrated in the _Odyssey_, and to the tragedies of the
house of Atreus, as told for instance in Aeschylus' _Oresteia_.
Agamemnon together with Cassandra, and in part because he brought
Cassandra, was murdered--felled with an axe--on his return home by his
wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Their bodies were cast into
a pit among the rocks. In vengeance for this, Orestes, Agamemnon's son,
committed "mother-murder," and in consequence wa