Orestes

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. Old man, I am afraid to speak before you,
  2. in a matter where I am sure to grieve you to the heart. I am unholy because I killed my mother, I know it, yet holy on another count, because I avenged my father. Only let your years, which frighten me from speaking, set no barrier in the path of my words,
  3. and I will go forward; but now I fear your gray hairs.
  4. What ought I to have done? Set one thing against another. My father begot me; your daughter gave me birth, being the field that received the seed from another; for without a father no child would ever be born.
  5. So I reasoned that I ought to stand by the author of my being rather than the woman who undertook to rear me. Now your daughter—I am ashamed to call her mother—came to a man’s bed in a private and unchaste wedding; I speak against myself when I speak
  6. badly of her, yet I will speak. Aegisthus was her secret husband in the home; I killed him, and I sacrificed my mother, an unholy crime, no doubt, but done to avenge my father.
  7. Now, as regards the matters for which I deserve to be stoned as you threatened,
  8. hear the service I am conferring on all Hellas. For if women become so bold as to murder their husbands, taking refuge in their children, with the mother’s breast to catch the pity, they would think nothing of destroying their husbands