Seven Against Thebes

Aeschylus

Aeschylus, Volume 1. Smyth, Herbert Weir, translator. London; New York: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1922.

  1. To their misery, indeed,
  2. they found a miserable death in the outrage done their house.
  1. Ah, you brothers who were poised to cast over the walls of your home and looked—to your sorrow—for sole rule, now you have been
  2. reconciled by the iron sword. The great Erinys of your father Oedipus has fulfilled it all truly.
Chorus
  1. Pierced through your left sides, pierced indeed—
  2. through those sides that were born from one womb! Ah, strange ones! Ah, the curses that demand death for death!
  3. Right through, as you say, were they struck, with blows to house and body by an unspeakable wrath and by the doom, called down by their father’s curse, which they shared without discord.
Chorus
  1. Groaning spreads throughout the city, too: the walls groan; the land that loves its sons groans. But for those who come after them there remains their property, on which account the strife
  2. of those terrible-fated men came to fulfillment in death. In their haste to anger they apportioned their property so that each has an equal share. To those who loved them their reconciler is not blameless,