The Phoenician Women

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. Hail to you! all hail! scarcely here in your mother’s arms, beyond hope and expectation. What can I say to you? How in every way, by hands, by words, in the mazy delight
  2. of the dance, shall I find the pleasure of my former joy? Ah! my son, you left your father’s house desolate, when your brother’s outrage drove you away in exile.
  3. Truly you were missed alike by your friends and Thebes. And so I cut my white hair and let it fall for grief, in tears, not clad in robes of white, my son,
  4. but taking instead these dark rags.
  5. While in the house the old blind man, always possessed by his tearful longing for the pair of brothers estranged from the home,
  6. rushed to kill himself with the sword or by the noose suspended over his chamber-roof, moaning his curses on his sons;