Alcestis
Euripides
Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Translated into English Prose from the Text of Paley. Vol. I. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1906.
- should hear the voice of weeping or be made sad. [Exit HERACLES.
- What doest thou? With such calamity before thee, hast thou the heart, Admetus, to welcome visitors? What means this folly?
- Well, and if I had driven him from my house and city when he came to be my guest, wouldst thou have praised me more?
- No indeed! for my calamity would have been no whit less, while I should have been more churlish. And this would have been another woe to add to mine, that my house should be called no friend to guests. Yea, and I find him myself the best of hosts
- whene’er to Argos’ thirsty land I come.
- Why then didst thou conceal thy present misfortune, if, as thy own lips declare, it was a friend that came?
- He would never have entered my house, had he known aught of my distress.
- Maybe there are who think me but a fool for acting thus, and these will blame me; but my halls have never learnt to drive away or treat with scorn my guests.
- O home of hospitality, thrown open by thy lord to all now and ever!
- In thee it was that Pythian Apollo, the sweet harper, deigned to make his home, and in thy halls was content to lead a shepherd’s life,
- piping o’er the sloping downs shepherd’s madrigals to thy flocks.
- And spotted lynxes couched amid his sheep in joy to hear his melody,
- and the lions’ tawny troop left the glen of Othrys and came; came too the dappled fawn on nimble foot from beyond the crested pines and frisked about thy lyre, O Phoebus,
- for very joy at thy gladsome minstrelsy.
- And so it is thy lord inhabits a home rich in countless flocks
- by Boebe’s lovely mere, bounding his tilled corn-land and his level pastures with the clime of the Molossi near the sun’s dark stable,
- and holding sway as far as the harbourless strand of the Aegean ’neath Pelion’s shadow.
- Now too hath he opened wide his house and welcomed a guest although his eye is wet with tears in mourning for his wife so dear
- but lately dead within his halls; yea, for noble birth to noble feeling is inclined.[*](In Nauck’s text the word ἄγαμαι is here inserted, but it is omitted by Paley.) And in the good completest wisdom dwells; and at my heart sits the bold belief
- that heaven’s servant will be .
- Men of Pherae, kindly gathered here, lo! even now my servants are bearing the corpse with all its trappings shoulder-high to the funeral pyre for burial; do ye, as custom bids,
- salute the dead on her last journey starting.
- Look! I see thy father advancing with aged step, and servants too bearing in their arms adornment for thy wife, offerings for the dead.