So then you have delivered into Achaea’s hand, O Zeus, your shrine in Ilium and your fragrant altar, the offerings of burnt sacrifice with smoke of myrrh to heaven uprising, and holy Pergamos, and glens of Ida tangled with the ivy’s growth, where rills of melting snow pour down their flood, a holy sun-lit land that bounds the world and takes the god’s first rays!

ChorusGone are your sacrifices! gone the dancer’s cheerful shout! gone the vigils of the gods as night closed in! your images of carven gold are now no more; and Phrygia’s holy festivals, twelve times a year, at each full moon, are ended now. It is this, it is this that fills me with anxious thought whether you, lord, seated on the sky, your heavenly throne, care at all that my city is destroyed, a prey to the furious fiery blast.

ChorusAh! my loved husband, you are a wandering spectre; unwashed, unburied lies your corpse, while over the sea the ship sped by wings will carry me to Argos, land of steeds, where stand Cyclopian walls of stone reaching to heaven. There in the gate the children gather,