Helen

Euripides

Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Translated into English Prose from the Text of Paley. Vol. I. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1906.

  1. Kill me;
  2. you will not kill your sister with my consent, but me instead; to die for their masters is the most glorious act for noble slaves.
Dioskouroi
  1. Restrain the anger that is wrongly carrying you away, Theoklymenos, king of this land. We, the twin sons of Zeus, are calling you; Leda once gave birth to us,
  2. with Helen, who has fled from your home. For you are angry about a marriage that is not destined for you; and your sister Theonoe, daughter of a Nereid goddess, does not wrong you when she honors the word of the gods and her father’s just commands.
  3. For it was ordained that Helen should live in your house up to the present time; but no longer, since Troy is wholly destroyed and she has provided her name to the gods; she must be united in her own marriage,
  4. and come home and live with her husband. But hold your black sword away from your sister, and believe that she is acting with discretion in this matter. Long ago, before this, we would have saved our sister, seeing that Zeus has made us gods;
  5. but we are weaker than fate and also than the gods, who decreed these things to happen in this way.
  6. This is my bidding to you, while I say to my sister: Sail on with your husband; and you shall have a favorable breeze; for we, your two savior brothers,
  7. riding over the sea, will send you to your fatherland. And when you make the last turn of the race-course and end your life, you will be named as a goddess, and share libations with the Dioskouroi, and receive gifts from men with us; for such is the will of Zeus.
  8. And the place where the son of Maia first set the boundary to your course through the air, when he took you away from Sparta, stealing your body so that Paris would not marry you—I mean the island stretched like a sentinel along the coast of Attica—shall be called by your name among men for the future, since it welcomed you
  9. when you were stolen from your home. And it is destined by the gods that the wanderer Menelaos will dwell in the islands of the blessed; for deities do not hate the well-born, but the sufferings of the multitude are greater.
Theoklymenos
  1. You sons of Leda and Zeus, I will let go my former quarrel over your sister; and mine I shall no longer try to kill. Let Helen go home, if the gods think it right. Know that you are born from the same blood as a sister
  2. who is the best and also most self-controlled; may you fare well, for the sake of Helen’s most noble mind, a quality not to be found in many women.
Chorus
  1. Many are the forms of divinities, and many things the gods bring to pass unhoped for.
  2. And what was expected has not been fulfilled; for what was not expected, a god finds a way. Such was the result of this action.