O daughter of Leto, Dictynna of the mountains, to your hall, to the golden walls of your temple with beautiful pillars, I, the servant of the holy key-holder, bend my holy virgin steps. For I have left the towers and walls of Hellas, famous for horses, and Europe with its forests, my father’s home.I have come. What is the news? What is troubling you? Why have you brought me, brought me to the shrine, you who are the daughter of Atreus’ son, master of a thousand ships and ten thousand soldiers, who came to the towers of Troy with a famous fleet?IphigeniaOh! My servants, how I am involved in mournful dirges, in laments unfit for the lyre, of a song that is not melodious, alas! alas! wailing for my family. Ruin has come to me; I am lamenting the life of my brother, such a vision I saw in my dreams, in the night whose darkness is now over.I am lost, lost! My father’s house is no more; alas for my vanished family, alas for the sufferings of Argos! O fate, I had one brother only and you carry him off and send him to Hades. For him, I am about to pour over the back of the earth these libations and the bowl of the dead: streams of milk from mountain cows, and offerings of wine from Bacchus, and the labor of the tawny bees; these sacrifices are soothing to the dead.(To a servant) Give me the golden vessel and the libation of Hades.O child of Agamemnon beneath the earth, I send these to you as one dead. Accept them; for I will not bring to your tomb my yellow hair or my tears. I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.ChorusI will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead, Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph.Alas for the house of the Atreidae; the light of their scepter, alas, of the ancestral house, is lost. Once they ruled as prosperous kings in Argos, but troubles dart out from troubles: Pelops, on his horses swiftly whirling, made his cast; the sun changed from its seat the holy beam of its rays.