Electra
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 6: The Electra. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894.
- —He reigns supreme with the wits of the living.
- ah, me!
- ah, me, indeed! For the murderess—
- Was slain.
- Yes.
- I know it; I know it. For a champion arose to avenge the grieving dead. But for me no champion remains: he who yet remained has been snatched clean away.
- Unhappy are you, unhappy your destiny!
- How well I know that, all too well, with my life swept through all the months by abundant terrors and horrors!
- We have witnessed the events for which you mourn.
- Cease, then, to divert me from it, since no longer—
- What do you say?
- —Since I no longer have hope in my brother, the seed of our shared noble line, to aid me.
- Nature ordains death as the destiny of all mortals.
- What, a death like the one which that ill-fated one died beneath a race of swift hooves, entangled in the cutting, dragging reins?
- The mutilation is beyond thought!
- Yes, so it is, when in foreign soil, without being tended by my hands—
- Ah, no!
- —he has been buried not receiving from me either burial
- or lamentation.
Enter Chrysothemis, from the right.Chrysothemis
- I am pursued by joy, dear sister, and I disregard seemliness in order to come with speed. I bring joyful news to relieve your former troubles and grief.