Euripides, Trojan Women 98–152: Hecuba's lament among the ruins

Lift your head, unhappy one, from the ground; raise up your neck; this is Troy no more, no longer am I queen in Ilium. Though fortune change, endure your lot; sail with the stream, and follow fortune’s tack, do not steer your ship of life against the tide, since chance must guide your course. Ah me! ah me! What else but tears is now my hapless lot, whose country, children, husband, all are lost? Ah! the high-blown pride of ancestors, humbled! how brought to nothing after all! What woe must I suppress, or what declare? Ah, woe is me! the anguish I suffer lying here stretched upon this hard pallet! O my head, my temples, my side! How I long to turn over, and lie now on this, now on that, to rest my back and spine, while ceaselessly my tearful wail ascends. For even this is music to the wretched, to chant their cheerless dirge of sorrow.

You swift-prowed ships, rowed to sacred Ilium over the deep dark sea, past the fair havens of Hellas, to the flute’s ill-omened music and the dulcet voice of pipes, to the bays of Troy, alas! where you tied your hawsers, twisted handiwork from Egypt, in quest of that hateful wife of Menelaus, who brought disgrace on Castor, and on Eurotas foul reproach; who murdered Priam, the father of fifty children; the cause why I, the unhappy Hecuba, have wrecked my life upon this disastrous strand. Oh that I should sit here, over against the tent of Agamemnon! As a slave I am led away from my home, an old woman, while from my head the hair is piteously shorn for grief. Ah! unhappy wives of those armored sons of Troy! Ah! poor maidens, luckless brides, come weep, for Ilium is now a smouldering ruin; and I, like some mother-bird that over her fledgelings screams, will begin the strain; not the same as that I once sang to the gods, as I leaned on Priam’s staff and beat with my foot in Phrygian time to lead the dance!