Hecuba
Euripides
Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Translated into English Prose from the Text of Paley. Vol. II. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1891.
- is not this a sight to fill you with wonder, and upset your hopes?
- Ah me! it is the corpse of my son Polydorus I behold, whom the Thracian man was keeping safe for me in his halls. Alas! this is the end of all; my life is over. chanting O my son, my son,
- alas! I now begin the laments, a frantic strain I learned just now from some avenging fiend.
- What! so you knew your son’s fate, poor lady?
- I cannot, cannot credit this fresh sight I see.
- One woe succeeds to another; no day will ever pass without groans and tears.
- Alas! poor lady, our sufferings are cruel indeed.
- O my son, child of a luckless mother,
- what was the manner of your death? by what fate do you lie here? by whose hands?
- I do not know. I found him on the sea-shore.
- Cast up on the smooth sand, or thrown there
- after the murderous blow?
- The waves had washed him ashore.
- Alas! alas! I now know the vision I saw in my sleep; the dusky-winged phantom
- did not escape me, the vision I saw of you, my son, now no more within the bright sunshine.
- Who slew him then? Can your dream-lore tell us that?
- It was my own familiar friend, the knight of Thrace, with whom his aged father had placed the boy in hiding.
- O horror! what will you say? did he slay him to get the gold?
- O dreadful crime! O deed without a name! beyond wonder!
- impious! intolerable! Where are the laws between guest and host? Accursed of men! how have you mangled his flesh, slashing the poor child’s limbs