Ajax
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 7: The Ajax. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891.
- I am afraid when I hear this eager haste. Your tongue’s sharp edge does not please me.
- Ajax, my lord, what can you have in mind?
- Do not keep asking me, do not keep questioning. Self-restraint is a virtue.
- Ah, how I despair! Now, by your child, by the gods, I implore you, do not betray us!
- You annoy me too much. Do you not know
- that I no longer owe any service to the gods?
- Hush, no impiety!
- Speak to those who hear.
- You will not listen?
- Already your words have been too many.
- Yes, because I am afraid, my king!
- Close the doors this instant!
- In the name of the gods, be softened!
- You have foolish hope, I think,
- if you plan so late to begin schooling my temper.
- O famous Salamis, you, I know, have your happy seat among the waves that beat your shore, eternally conspicuous in the eyes of all men.
- But I, miserable, have long been delayed here, still making my bed through countless months in the camp on the fields of Ida.
- I am worn by time and with anxious expectation still of a journey to Hades the abhorred, the unseen.
- And now a new struggle awaits me, ah, me!—a match with
- Ajax, hard to cure, sharing his tent with a madness of divine origin. It is he whom mighty in bold war you dispatched from you once far in the past. But now he is changed; he grazes his thoughts in isolated places