ChorusSo too endured Danae in her beauty
to change the light of the sky for
brass-bound walls, and in that chamber, both burial and bridal, she was
held in strict confinement. And yet was she of esteemed lineage, my
daughter, and guarded a
deposit of the seed of Zeus that had fallen in a golden rain. But
dreadful is the mysterious power of fate—there is no deliverance from it
by wealth or by war, by towered city, or dark, sea-beaten ships.
ChorusAnd Dryas’s son, the Edonian king swift to rage, was
tamed in recompense for his frenzied insults, when, by the will of
Dionysus, he was shut in a rocky prison. There the fierce and
swelling force of his madness trickled away. That man came to know the god whom in his
frenzy he had provoked with mockeries. For he had sought to quell the
god-inspired women and the Bacchanalian fire, and he angered the Muses who love the flute.
ChorusAnd by the waters of the Dark
Rocks, the waters of the twofold sea, are the shores of Bosporus and the Thracian city
Salmydessus, where Ares,
neighbor of that city, saw the accursed, blinding wound inflicted on the
two sons of Phineus by his savage wife. It was a wound that brought
darkness to the hollows, making them crave vengeance for the eyes she crushed with her bloody hands
and with her shuttle for a dagger. ChorusWasting away in their misery, they
bewailed their miserable suffering and their birth from their mother stripped of her
marriage. But she traced her descent from the ancient line of the
Erechtheids, and in far-distant caves she was raised amidst her
father’s gusts. She was the child of Boreas, running swift as
horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods. Yet she, too, was
assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.