Iphigenia in Tauris

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.

  1. O daughter of Leto, Dictynna of the mountains, to your hall, to the golden walls of your temple with beautiful pillars,
  2. I, the servant of the holy key-holder, bend my holy virgin steps. For I have left the towers and walls of Hellas, famous for horses, and
  3. Europe with its forests, my father’s home.
  4. I have come. What is the news? What is troubling you? Why have you brought me, brought me to the shrine, you who are the daughter of Atreus’ son, master of a thousand ships and ten thousand soldiers,
  5. who came to the towers of Troy with a famous fleet?
Iphigenia
  1. Oh! My servants, how I am involved in mournful dirges,
  2. in laments unfit for the lyre, of a song that is not melodious, alas! alas! wailing for my family. Ruin has come to me; I am lamenting the life of my brother,
  3. such a vision I saw in my dreams, in the night whose darkness is now over.
  4. I am lost, lost! My father’s house is no more; alas for my vanished family,
  5. alas for the sufferings of Argos! O fate, I had one brother only and you carry him off and send him to Hades. For him,
  6. I am about to pour over the back of the earth these libations and the bowl of the dead: streams of milk from mountain cows, and offerings of wine from Bacchus,
  7. and the labor of the tawny bees; these sacrifices are soothing to the dead.
  8. (To a servant) Give me the golden vessel and the libation of Hades.
  9. O child of Agamemnon beneath the earth, I send these to you as one dead. Accept them; for I will not bring to your tomb my yellow hair or my tears.
  10. I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.
Chorus
  1. I will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and
  2. a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead,
  3. Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph.
  4. Alas for the house of the Atreidae; the light of their scepter, alas, of the ancestral house, is lost. Once they ruled
  5. as prosperous kings in Argos, but troubles dart out from troubles: Pelops, on his horses swiftly whirling, made his cast; the sun changed from its seat the holy beam of its rays.