Hiding, enjoyed repose within our mansion beguested!Whither can wend I now? What hope lends help to the lost one?Idomenean mounts shall I scale? Ah, parted by whirlpoolsWidest, yon truculent main where yields it power of passage?Aid of my sire can I crave? Whom I willing abandoned,Treading in tracks of a youth bewrayed with blood of a brother!Can I console my soul with the helpful love of a helpmateWho flies me with pliant oars, flies overbounding the sea-depths?Nay, if this Coast I quit, this lone isle lends me no roof-tree,Nor aught issue allows begirt by billows of Ocean:Nowhere is path for flight: none hope shows: all things are silent:All be a desolate waste: all makes display of destruction.Yet never close these eyes in latest languor of dying,Ne'er from my wearied frame go forth slow-ebbing my senses,Ere from the Gods just doom implore I, treason-betrayed,And with my breath supreme firm faith of Celestials invoke I.Therefore, O you who 'venge man's deed with penalties direful,Eumenides! aye wont to bind with viperous hairlocksForeheads,—Oh, deign outspeak fierce wrath from bosom outbreathing,Hither, Oh hither, speed, and lend you all ear to my grievance,Which now sad I (alas!) outpour from innermost vitalsMaugre my will, sans help, blind, fired with furious madness.And, as indeed all spring from veriest core of my bosom,Suffer you not the cause of grief and woe to evanish;But with the Will wherewith could Theseus leave me in loneness,Goddesses! bid that Will lead him, lead his, to destruction."

E'en as she thus poured forth these words from anguish of bosom,And for this cruel deed, distracted, sued she for vengeance,Nodded the Ruler of Gods Celestial, matchless of All-might,When at the gest earth-plain and horrid spaces of oceanTrembled, and every sphere rockt stars and planets resplendent.Meanwhile Theseus himself, obscured in blindness of darknessAs to his mind, dismiss'd from breast oblivious all thingsErewhile enjoined and held hereto in memory constant,Nor for his saddened sire the gladness-signals uphoistingHeralded safe return within sight of the Erechthean harbour.For 'twas told of yore, when from walls of the Virginal DeessAegeus speeding his son, to the care of breezes committed,Thus with a last embrace to the youth spoke words of commandment:

"Son! far nearer my heart (you alone) than life of the longest,Son, I perforce dismiss to doubtful, dangerous chances,Lately restored to me when eld draws nearest his ending,Since such fortune in me, and in you such boiling of valourTear you away from me so loath, whose eyes in their languorNever are sated with sight of my son, all-dearest of figures.Nor will I send you forth with joy that gladdens my bosom,Nor will I suffer you show boon signs of favouring Fortune,But from my soul I'll first express an issue of sorrow,Soiling my hoary hairs with dust and ashes commingled;Then will I hang stained sails fast-made to the wavering yard-arms,So shall our mourning thought and burning torture of spiritShow by the dark sombre-dye of Iberian canvas spread.But, grant me the grace Who dwells in Sacred Itone,(And our issue to guard and ward the seats of ErechtheusSware She) that if your right is besprent with blood of the Man-Bull,Then do you so-wise act, and stored in memory's heart-coreDwell these mandates of me, no time their traces untracing.Dip, when first shall arise our hills to gladden your eye-glance,Down from your every mast the ill-omened vestments of mourning,Then let the twisten ropes upheave the whitest of canvas,Wherewith splendid shall gleam the tallest spars of the top-mast,These seeing sans delay with joy exalting my spiritWell shall I wot boon Time sets you returning before me."

Such were the mandates which stored at first in memory constantFaded from Theseus' mind like mists, compelled by the whirlwind,Fleet from aerial crests of mountains hoary with snow-drifts.But as the sire had sought the citadel's summit for outlook,Wasting his anxious eyes with tear-floods evermore flowing,Forthright e'en as he saw the sail-gear darkened with dye-stain,Headlong himself flung he from the sea-cliff's pinnacled summitHolding his Theseus lost by doom of pitiless Fortune.Thus as he came to the home funest, his roof-tree paternal,Theseus (vaunting the death), what dule to the maiden of Minos