Heracles
Euripides
Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Translated into English Prose from the Text of Paley. Vol. II. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1891.
- What are you saying? What did he have to fear from my orphan babes?
- He was afraid they might some day avenge Creon’s death.
- What is this dress they wear, suited to the dead?
- It is the garb of death we have already put on.
- And were you being forced to die? O woe is me!
- Yes, deserted by every friend, and informed that you were dead.
- What put such desperate thoughts into your heads?
- That was what the heralds of Eurystheus kept proclaiming.
- Why did you leave my hearth and home?
- He forced us; your father was dragged from his bed.
- Had he no shame, to ill-use the old man so?
- Shame indeed! that goddess and he dwell far enough apart.
- Was I so poor in friends in my absence?
- Who are the friends of a man in misfortune?
- Do they make so light of my hard warring with the Minyans?
- Misfortune, to repeat it to you, has no friends.
- Cast from your heads these chaplets of death, look up to the light, for instead of the darkness below your eyes behold the welcome sun.
- I, meanwhile, since here is work for my hand, will first go raze this upstart tyrant’s halls, and when I have beheaded the villain, I will throw him to dogs to tear; and every Theban who I find has played the traitor after my kindness,
- will I destroy with this victorious club; the rest will I tear apart with my feathered shafts and fill Ismenus full of bloody corpses, and Dirce’s clear stream shall run red with gore. For whom ought I to help rather than wife
- and children and aged father? Farewell my labors! for it was in vain I accomplished them rather than helping these. And yet I ought to die in their defence, since they for their father were doomed; or what shall we find so noble in having fought a hydra and a lion