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.
- and the rags of my dress, will be fit for a princess, a daughter of Agamemnon, or for Troy, once taken, which remembers my father.
- Mighty is the goddess; come then, and borrow from me thick-woven clothes to wear, and gold—as a favor to me—accessories to adornment. Do you think to rule over your enemies by tears, if you do not revere the gods?
- Honoring the gods not by lamentation but by prayers, you will have good fortune, child.
- No god attends to the voice of the ill-fated one,
- or to the slaying of my father long ago. Alas for the dead, and for the living vagabond, who dwells in another land somewhere,
- miserably wandering to a slave’s hearth, yet born of that renowned father. I myself live in a poor man’s house, wasting my life away, an exile from my father’s house,
- on the mountain crags. But my mother, with a new husband, makes her home in a bed stained by blood.
- Helen, your mother’s sister, is the cause of many evils to the Hellenes and to your house.
- Ah! Women, I have broken off my lament; strangers, who had their lair at the altar, are rising from ambush towards the household. Let us escape the villains by flight, you along the path and I to the house.