Agamemnon
Aeschylus
Aeschylus, Volume 2. Smyth, Herbert Weir, translator. London; New York: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.
- will slay me, miserable as I am. Brewing as it were a drug, she vows that with her wrath she will mix requital for me too, while she whets her sword against her husband, to take murderous vengeance for bringing me here. Why then do I bear these mockeries of myself,
- this wand, these prophetic chaplets on my neck? Breaking her wand, she throws it and the other insignia of her prophetic office upon the ground, and tramples them underfoot You at least I will destroy before I die myself. To destruction with you! And fallen there, thus do I repay you. Enrich with doom some other in my place. Look, Apollo himself is stripping me
- of my prophetic garb—he that saw me mocked to bitter scorn, even in this bravery, by friends turned foes, with one accord, in vain—but, like some vagrant mountebank, called beggar, wretch, starveling, I bore it all.
- And now the prophet, having undone me, his prophetess, has brought me to this lethal pass. Instead of my father’s altar a block awaits me, where I am to be butchered in a hot and bloody sacrifice. Yet, we shall not die unavenged by the gods;
- for there shall come in turn another, our avenger, a scion of the race, to slay his mother and exact requital for his sire; an exile, a wanderer, a stranger from this land, he shall return to put the coping-stone upon these unspeakable iniquities of his house. For the gods have sworn a mighty oath
- that his slain father’s outstretched corpse shall bring him home. Why then thus raise my voice in pitiful lament? Since first I saw the city of Ilium fare what it has fared, while her captors, by the gods’ sentence, are coming to such an end,
- I will go in and meet my fate. I will dare to die. This door I greet as the gates of Death. And I pray that, dealt a mortal stroke, without a struggle, my life-blood ebbing away in easy death, I may close these eyes.
- O woman, pitiful exceedingly and exceeding wise, long has been your speech. But if, in truth, you have knowledge of your own death, how can you step with calm courage to the altar like an ox, driven by the god?
- There is no escape; no, my friends, there is none any more.[*](Auratus read χρόνου πλέων : more than that of time, save for time.)
- Yet he that is last has the advantage in respect of time.
- The day has come; flight would profit me but little.
- Well, be assured, you brave suffering with a courageous spirit.
- None who is happy is commended thus.
- Yet surely to die nobly is a blessing for mortals.
- Alas for you, my father and for your noble children! She starts back in horror
- What ails you? What terror turns you back?
- Alas, alas!
- Why do you cry alas? Unless perhaps there is some horror in your soul.
- This house stinks of blood-dripping slaughter.
- And what of that? It is just the savor of victims at the hearth.