Euripides was almost alone in making the fate of the Trojan women his central focus. While Virgil dedicated the second book of the Aeneid to a virtuoso account of the Trojan horse gliding into the citadel and unleashing its terror, the now little-read Quintus Smyrnaeus captured the moment Achilles was struck fatally in the heel. It fell to other poets to describe the fall of Troy and its aftermath. She and the other surviving women will be led away on Greek ships. ‘I do not think he will reach his teenage years,’ says Andromache of the baby Hector left behind. In the closing scenes of Homer’s Iliad, the warrior’s widow, mother and sister-in-law pine over his battered corpse before it is consigned to the flames and envisage further miseries before them. O nce Hector was dead, there was no hope for the Trojans.
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