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. for Theban blood, leading your revels that are held without music. Nor do you rush with wild waving of the thyrsus, clad in fawnskin, but with chariots and horses you go to the waters of Ismenus, inspiring the Argives
  2. with hatred for the Spartans, arraying in bronze armor against these stone-built walls a band of warriors and their shields.
  3. Truly Strife is a goddess to fear, who devised these troubles for the princes of this land,
  4. for the much-suffering sons of Labdacus.
Chorus
  1. O snow-capped Cithaeron, dear to Artemis, holy vale of leaves, crowded with wild animals, would that you had never reared the one exposed to die, Oedipus, Jocasta’s child, when as a baby he was cast forth from his home,
  2. marked with a golden brooch; and would that the Sphinx, that winged maid, monster from the hills, had never come as a grief to our land with her inharmonious songs, she that once drew near our walls and snatched the sons of Cadmus away in her taloned feet to the untrodden light of heaven,
  3. sent by Hades from hell to plague the men of Thebes; once more unhappy strife is coming into bloom between the sons of Oedipus in home and city. For never can wrong be right,
  4. nor can there be good in unlawful children, their mother’s birth pangs, their father’s pollution; she came to the bed of her son. . . .
Chorus
  1. O Earth, you once bore—as I heard, I heard the story told by foreigners once in my own home—you bore
  2. a race which sprang of the teeth of a snake with blood-red crest, that fed on beasts, to be the glory and reproach of Thebes.
  3. In days gone by the sons of heaven came to the wedding of Harmonia, and the walls and towers of Thebes rose to the sound of Amphion’s lyre,
  4. in the midst between the double streams where Dirce waters the grass-green field before Ismenus; and Io, our horned ancestress, was mother of the kings of Thebes;
  5. thus our city, through an endless succession of various blessings, has set herself upon the heights, crowned with the glory of war.
Teiresias
  1. led in by his daughter.Lead on, my daughter; for you are an eye
  2. to my blind feet, as a star is to sailors; lead my steps on to level ground; then go before, so that I do not stumble, for your father has no strength; keep safe for me in your maiden hand the auguries I took when I observed omens from birds,
  3. seated in my holy prophet’s chair. Tell me, Menoeceus, son of Creon, how much further toward the city is it, to your father? For my knees grow weary, I have come a long way and can scarcely go on.
Creon
  1. Take heart, Teiresias, for you have reached your harbor and are near your friends; take him by the hand, my child; for just as every chariot has to wait for outside help to lighten it, so does the step of old age.
Teiresias
  1. Enough; I have arrived; why, Creon, do you summon me so urgently?
Creon
  1. I have not forgotten that; but first collect your strength and regain your breath, shaking off the fatigue of your journey.
Teiresias
  1. I am indeed worn out, for I arrived here only yesterday from the court of the Erechtheidae; they too were at war, fighting with Eumolpus.