Agamemnon How? what will you do? will you take a sword in your old hand and slay the barbarian, or do you have drugs or some means to aid you? Who will take your part? Where will you procure friends?
Hecuba Sheltered beneath these tents is a crowd of Trojan women.
Agamemnon Do you mean the captives, the booty of the Hellenes?
Hecuba With their help I will punish my murderous foe.
Agamemnon How are women to master men?
Hecuba Numbers are a fearful thing, and joined to craft a desperate foe.
Agamemnon True; still I have a mean opinion of the female race.
Hecuba What? did not women slay the sons of Aegyptus, and utterly clear Lemnos of men? But let it be thus; put an end to our conference, and send this woman for me safely through the army. And you are to draw near my Thracian friend and say, Hecuba, once queen of Ilium, summons you, on your own business no less than hers, your children too, for they also must hear what she has to say. Defer awhile, Agamemnon, the burial of Polyxena lately slain, so that brother and sister may be laid on the same pyre and buried side by side, a double cause of sorrow to their mother.
Agamemnon So shall it be; yet if the army were able to sail, I could not have granted you this favor; but as it is, for the god sends forth no favoring breeze, the army must wait and look for a calm voyage. Good luck to you, for this is the interest alike of individual and state, that the wrong-doer be punished and the good man prosper.
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