The Suppliant Maidens
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.
- Sorrows heavy enough to bear.
- Ah me!
- Thy groans mingle with those of their parents.[*](Reading with Hartung τοῖς τεκοῦσς’ ὁμοῦ λέγεις.)
- Hear me.
- O’er both of us thou dost lament.
- Would God the Theban ranks had laid me dead in the dust!
- Oh that I had ne’er been wedded to a husband!
- Behold this sea of troubles
- Ah! hapless mothers.
- Our nails have ploughed our cheeks in furrows, and o’er our heads have we strewn ashes.
- Ah me! ah me! Oh that earth’s floor would swallow me,
- or the whirlwind snatch me away, or Zeus’s flaming bolt descend upon my head!
- Bitter the marriages thou didst witness, bitter the oracle of Phoebus!
- The curse of Oedipus, fraught with sorrow, after desolating[*](For the unintelligible ἔλημας of the MS. Hermann conjectured ἔρημα σ’ which is here followed.) his house, is come on thee.
- [*](There is some corruption in the three following lines. Nauck’s εἴασα for the words ἐς τὰ σά γε makes it possible to extract meaning, but further emendation is needed. Nauck would omit the word στρατῷ in l. 838 and the whole of l. 839, except the word γόους.) I meant to question thee when thou wert venting thy lamentations to the host, but I will let it pass; yet, though I dropped the matter then
- and left it alone, I now do ask Adrastus, Of what lineage sprang those youths, to shine so bright in chivalry? Tell it to our younger citizens of thy fuller wisdom, for thou art skilled to know. Myself beheld their daring deeds, too high for words to tell,