Electra
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 6: The Electra. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894.
- Your coming, sir, deserves large recompense, if you have stopped her clamorous tongue.
- Then I would take my leave, if all is well.
- Not so; your welcome would then be unworthy of me, and of my ally who sent you. No, come in. Leave her out here to shout out loud her misfortunes and those of her friends.Clytaemnestra and the Paedagogus enter the house.
- What do you think? Does it seem to you that she, poor woman, wept and wailed terribly,
- like a grieving, anguished woman, over her son thus destroyed? No, she left us with a laugh! Ah, miserable me! Dearest Orestes, how your death has destroyed me! For your passing has torn from my heart
- the only hopes which still were mine: that you would live to return some day as the avenger of our father, and also of me in my misery. But now, where shall I turn? I am alone, cheated of you, as of my father. Hereafter I must be a slave again
- among those I most hate, my father’s murderers. Am I not in a fine way? But at least in the time remaining me I will never enter the house to dwell with them. No, lying down at these gates, without a friend, I shall wither away my days.
- Therefore, if anyone in the house be angry, let him kill me. It is a favor, if I die, but a pain, if I live. I desire life no more.
- Where are the thunderbolts of Zeus, or where the
- shining Sun, if they look upon these things and quietly cover them over?
- Ah, me, ah, me!
- My child, why do you weep?
- Oh!
- Give no cry of bad omen!
- You will break my heart!
- How do you mean?
- If you suggest that I keep hope for those who have surely passed to Hades,
- you will trample even harder upon me as I waste away.
- No, for I know that the prince Amphiaraus was ensnared by a woman’s chain of gold and swallowed up. And now beneath the earth—
- ah, me, ah, me!