Libation Bearers

Aeschylus

Aeschylus, Volume 2. Smyth, Herbert Weir, translator. London; New York: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.

  1. Yet heaven, if it pleases, may still turn our utterance to more joyfully sounding strains. In place of dirges over a tomb, a song of triumph within the royal halls will welcome back a reunited friend.[*](νεοκρᾶτα,newly-mixed. As friendship, when begun, was pledged by a loving-cup, so Orestes, after his long absence, is to be welcomed as a new friend.)
Orestes
  1. Ah, my father, if only beneath Ilium’s walls you had been slain, slashed by some Lycian spearman! Then you would have left a good name for your children in their halls,
  2. and in their maturity you would have made their lives admired by men. And in a land beyond the sea you would have found a tomb heaped high with earth, no heavy burden for your house to bear—
Chorus
  1. —Welcomed there below by your comrades
  2. who nobly fell, a ruler of august majesty, distinguished even beneath the earth, and minister of the mightiest, the deities who rule in the nether world.[*](Pluto and Proserpine.)