Agamemnon
Aeschylus
Aeschylus, Volume 2. Smyth, Herbert Weir, translator. London; New York: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.
- Ah! Ah! What apparition is this?
- Is it a net of death? No, it is a snare that shares his bed, that shares the guilt of murder. Let the fatal pack, insatiable against the race, raise a shout of jubilance over a victim accursed
- What Spirit of Vengeance is this that you bid
- raise its voice over this house? Your words do not cheer me. Back to my heart surge the drops of my pallid blood, even as when they drip from a mortal wound, ebbing away as life’s beams sink low; and death comes speedily.
- Ah, ah, see there, see there! Keep the bull from his mate! She has caught him in the robe and gores him with the crafty device of her black horn! He falls in a vessel of water! It is of doom wrought by guile in a murderous bath that I am telling you.
- I cannot boast that I am a keen judge of prophecies; but these, I think, spell some evil. But from prophecies what word of good ever comes to mortals? Through terms of evil their wordy arts
- bring men to know fear chanted in prophetic strains.
- Alas, alas, the sorrow of my ill-starred doom! For it is my own affliction, crowning the cup, that I bewail. Ah, to what end did you bring me here, unhappy as I am? For nothing except to die—and not alone. What else?
- Frenzied in soul you are, by some god possessed, and you wail in wild strains your own fate, like that brown bird that never ceases making lament (ah me!), and in the misery of her heart moans Itys, Itys,
- throughout all her days abounding in sorrow, the nightingale.
- Ah, fate of the clear-voiced nightingale! The gods clothed her in a winged form and gave to her a sweet life without tears[*](The wailing (l. 1144) of the bird is unconscious (Schol.).). But for me waits destruction by the two-edged sword.
- From where come these vain pangs of prophecy that assail you? And why do you mold to melody these terrors with dismal cries blended with piercing strains? How do you know the bounds of the path of your
- ill-boding prophecy?
- Ah, the marriage, the marriage of Paris, that destroyed his friends! Ah me, Scamander, my native stream! Upon your banks in bygone days, unhappy maid, was I nurtured with fostering care;
- but now by Cocytus and the banks of Acheron, I think, I soon must chant my prophecies.
- What words are these you utter, words all too plain? A new-born child hearing them could understand. I am smitten with a deadly pain, while,
- by reason of your cruel fortune, you cry aloud your pitiful moans that break my heart to hear.
- O the sufferings, the sufferings of my city utterly destroyed! Alas, the sacrifices my father offered, the many pasturing cattle slain to save its towers!
- Yet they provided no remedy to save the city from suffering even as it has; and I, my soul on fire, must soon fall to the ground.
- Your present speech chimes with your former strain.