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,