Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 2: The Oedipus at Colonus. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889.
- What will you do, then?
- What is it that you fear?
- Men will come—
- But these men here will see to that.
- Beware that if you leave me—
- Do not instruct me in my duties.
- Fear constrains me—
- My heart feels no fear.
- You do not know the threats—
- I know that none will lead you from here against my will. Often threats have blustered in men’s hearts with words loud and vain; but when the mind comes to itself once more,
- the threats have vanished. For those men, too, perhaps—yes, even if in boldness they have spoken dreadful things of bringing you back, the voyage here will prove long and hard to sail. Now I exhort you, apart from any decision of mine, to take heart,
- if indeed Phoebus has been your escort here. Even if I am not present, still my name, I know, will shield you from harm.
- Stranger, in this land of fine horses you have come to earth’s fairest home, the shining Colonus.
- Here the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note under the trees of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy
- and the god’s inviolate foliage, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun, unvexed by the wind of any storm. Here the reveller Dionysus ever walks the ground,
- companion of the nymphs that nursed him.
- And, fed on heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms day by day with its fair clusters; it is the ancient crown of the Great Goddesses.
- And the crocus blooms with a golden gleam. Nor do the ever-flowing springs diminish, from which the waters of Cephisus wander, and each day with pure
- current it moves over the plains of the land’s swelling bosom, bringing fertility. Nor have the dancing Muses shunned this place, nor Aphrodite of the golden rein.
- And there is a thing such as I have not heard of on Asian ground,