Heracles
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 he sleeping?
- Yes, he is sleeping, a deadly sleepless sleep, having slain wife and children with the arrows of his twanging bow.
- Ah! mourn—
- Indeed I do.
- The children’s death—
- Ah me!
- And your own son’s doom.
- Alas!
- Old friend—
- Hush! hush! he is turning over, he is waking! Oh!
- let me hide myself, concealed beneath the roof.
- Courage! darkness still holds your son’s eye.
- Oh beware! it is not that I shrink from leaving the light after my miseries, poor wretch! but if should he slay me, his father,
- then he will be devising mischief on mischief, and to the avenging curse will add a parent’s blood.
- Well for you if you had died in that day, when, for your wife, you went forth to exact vengeance for her slain brothers
- by sacking the Taphians’ sea-beat town.
- Fly, fly, my aged friends, from before the palace, escape his waking fury. Or soon he will heap up fresh slaughter on the old,
- ranging wildly once more through the streets of Thebes.
- O Zeus, why have you shown such savage hate against your own son and plunged him in this sea of troubles?
- Aha! I am alive and breathing; and my eyes resume their function, opening on