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.

  1. 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,
  2. for very joy at thy gladsome minstrelsy.
Chorus
  1. And so it is thy lord inhabits a home rich in countless flocks
  2. 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,
  3. and holding sway as far as the harbourless strand of the Aegean ’neath Pelion’s shadow.
Chorus
  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. that heaven’s servant will be .
Admetus
  1. 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,
  2. salute the dead on her last journey starting.
Chorus
  1. Look! I see thy father advancing with aged step, and servants too bearing in their arms adornment for thy wife, offerings for the dead.
Pheres
  1. My son, I come to share thy sorrow,
  2. for thou hast lost a noble, peerless wife; that no man will deny. Yet must thou needs bear this blow, hard though it be. Accept this garniture, and let it go beneath the earth, for rightly is her body honoured,
  3. since she died to save thy life, my son, and gave me back my child, suffering me not to lose thee and pine away in an old age of sorrow. Thus by the generous deed she dared, hath she made her life a noble example for all her sex.
  4. Farewell to thee, who hast saved this son of mine and raised me up when falling; be thine a happy lot even in Hades’ halls! Such marriages I declare are gain to man, else to wed is not worth while.
Admetus
  1. Thou hast come uncalled by me to this burial,
  2. nor do I count thy presence as a friendly act. Never shall she be clad in any garniture of thine, nor[*](Nauck brackets this line as spurious.) in her burial will she need aught of thine. Thou shouldst have shewn thy sympathy at the time my doom was sealed. But thou didst stand aloof and let another die,
  3. though thou wert old, the victim young; shalt thou then mourn the dead? Methinks thou wert no real sire of mine nor was she my true mother who calls herself and is called so, but[*](Nauck refuses to credit Euripides with lines 638 and 639.) I was sprung of slave’s blood and privily substituted at thy wife’s breast.
  4. Brought to the test thou hast shewn thy nature; I cannot think I am thy child by birth. By heaven, thou art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of life, wouldst not, nay! couldst not find the heart to die
  5. for thy own son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom I henceforth shall
    justly hold e’en as mother and as father too, and none but her. And yet ’twas a noble exploit to achieve, to die to save thy son, and in any case the