Iphigenia in Aulis

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. never shall king Agamemnon touch your daughter, no! not even to the laying of a finger-tip upon her robe; or Sipylus[*](A mountain in Lycia, near which was shown the grave of Tantalus, the ancestor of the Atridae; the town of the same name was swallowed up in very early times by an earthquake.), that frontier town of barbarism, the cradle of those chieftains’ line, will be henceforth a city indeed, while Phthia’s name will nowhere find mention.
  2. Calchas, the seer, shall rue beginning the sacrifice with his barley-meal and lustral water. Why, what is a seer? A man who with luck tells the truth sometimes, with frequent falsehoods, but when his luck deserts him, collapses then and there.
  3. It is not to secure a bride that I have spoken thus—there are maids unnumbered
  4. eager to have my love[*](Reading οὐ for ἧ, and regarding μυρίαι—τοὐμὸν as parenthetical, which in the main is the view taken by Nauck and Klotz of this very nnsatisfactory passage. Paley, regarding it as an interpolation, disdains to emend it.)—no! but king Agamemnon has put an insult on me; he should have asked my leave to use my name as a means to catch the child, for it was I[*](i.e., it was my rank, etc., as described by Agamemnon, that carried the day, and, such being the case, I ought to have had some voice in the matter. (Paley.)) chiefly who induced Clytemnestra to betroth her daughter to me;
  5. I would had yielded this to Hellas, if that was where our going to Ilium broke down; I would never have refused to further my fellow soldiers’ common interest. But as it is, I am as nothing in the eyes of those chieftains, and little they care of treating me well or ill.