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. Do not be a prophetess of sorrow, dear friend, anticipating lamentation.
Helen
  1. What has my poor husband suffered? Does he see the light and the sun’s chariot and the paths of the stars? Or does he have a lasting fate
  2. among the dead beneath the earth?
Chorus
  1. Take a brighter view of the future, whatever will happen.
Helen
  1. For I call on you, I swear to you, Eurotas green with watery reeds,
  2. if this rumor of my husband’s death is true—and what was obscure in those words?—I will stretch a deadly noose about my neck, or drive inward a murderous thrust of slaughter that gushes from the throat,
  3. a contest of the blade through my flesh, as a sacrifice to the three goddesses and to the son of Priam, who once sat on the hollows of Ida, near the ox-stalls.
Chorus
  1. May sorrow be turned aside elsewhere, and may your lot be fortunate!
Helen
  1. Oh, unhappy Troy! Through deeds not done by yourself, you are ruined, and have suffered pitiably; for the gift that Kypris gave me has caused much blood
  2. and many tears; it has added grief to grief and tear to tear, sorrows. . . . Mothers have lost their children and virgin sisters of the slain have cut off their hair by the swollen tide of Phrygian Skamandros.
  3. And Hellas has cried aloud, aloud, and broken forth in wailing, beating her head, and drenching her soft-skinned cheek with the bloody strokes of her nails.
  4. O maiden Kallisto, blessed once in Arcadia, who climbed into the bed of Zeus on four paws, how much happier was your lot than my mother’s, you who in the form of a shaggy-limbed beast—the bearing of a lioness with your fierce eye—changed your burden of sorrow;
  5. and also the one whom Artemis once drove from her chorus, as a deer with horns of gold, the Titan girl, daughter of Merops, because of her loveliness; but the beauty of my body has destroyed the Dardanian towers, it has destroyed them and
  6. the lost Achaeans.
Exit Helen.
Menelaos
  1. O Pelops, who once held that chariot-race contest with Oinomaos over Pisa, if only, when you were persuaded to make a banquet for the gods, you had left your life then, inside the gods,