Electra
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.
- Alas for your fate; you gave birth to unbearable pain, and you suffered it, miserably and beyond, from your children. Yet you have rightly paid for their father’s murder.
- Ah, Phoebus! you proclaimed in song unclear justice, but you have brought about clear woes, and granted me a bloody destiny far from the land of Hellas. To what other city can I go?
- What host, what pious man will look at me, who killed my mother?
- Ah me! Where can I go, to what dance, to what marriage? What husband will receive me
- into the bridal bed?
- Again, again your thought changes with the breeze; for now you think piously, though you did not before, and you did dreadful things,
- my dear, to your unwilling brother.
- Did you see how the unhappy one threw off her robe and showed her bosom in the slaughter, alas, hurling to the ground the limbs that gave me birth? And her hair, I—
- I know it well; you passed through agony, hearing the mournful wail of the mother that bore you.
- She uttered this cry, putting her hand to my chin:
- My child, I entreat you! And she clung to my cheeks, so that the sword fell from my hand.
- The unhappy one! How did you endure to see the blood
- of your mother, breathing her last before your eyes?
- I threw my cloak over my eyes, and began the sacrifice by plunging the sword into my mother’s throat.
- And I urged you on and
- put my hand to the sword together with you.
- You have done the most dreadful of deeds.
- Take and hide the limbs of our mother beneath a robe, and close the wounds. Turning to the corpse Ah! You gave birth to your own murderers.
- There, I am putting this cloak over the one loved and not loved.
- An end of great troubles for the house.