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.
- What will you do? Where is your fury drifting you?
- I will die and return to that world below from which I have just come.
- Such language is fit for any common fellow.
- Ah! yours is the advice of one outside sorrow.
- Are these indeed the words of Heracles, the much-enduring?
- Though never so much as this. Endurance must have a limit.
- Is this the benefactor and great friend to mortals?
- Mortals bring no help to me; no! Hera has her way.
- Never would Hellas allow you to die through sheer perversity.
- Hear me a moment, that I may enter the contest with arguments in answer to your admonitions; and I will unfold to you why life now as well as formerly has been unbearable to me. First I am the son of a man who incurred the guilt of blood, before he married my mother Alcmena,
- by slaying her aged father. Now when the foundation is badly laid at birth, it is necessary for the race to be cursed with woe; and Zeus, whoever this Zeus may be, begot me as an enemy to Hera; yet do not be vexed, old man;