Libation Bearers
Aeschylus
Aeschylus, Volume 2. Smyth, Herbert Weir, translator. London; New York: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.
- 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.)
- 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,
- 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—
- —Welcomed there below by your comrades
- 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.)
- For in your life you were a king of those who have the power to assign the portion of death,[*](He was a king of those princes who have the right to apportion life or death to their subjects.) and who wield the staff all mortals obey.
- No, not even beneath the walls of Troy, father,
- would I wish you to have fallen and to be entombed beside Scamander’s waters among the rest of the host slain by the spear. I wish rather that his murderers had been killed by their own loved ones, just as they killed you,
- so that someone in a distant land who knew nothing of these present troubles should learn of their fatal doom.
- In this, my child, your wish is better than gold. It surpasses great good fortune, even that of the supremely blesssed;[*](The Hyperboreans, a fabulous people dwelling beyond the North wind, were imagined to live longer and in greater felicity than other mortals.) for it is easy to wish.
- But now the lash of this double scourge[*](The lash of this double scourge refers to the appeal to the dead, lashing him to vengenace, to the beating of the head and breast, and to the stamping open the ground, which, like the invocation of the dead, were intended to arouse the nether powers. The scourge is double (cp. Agam.647) because the participants in the scene are the two children (l. 334) and the Chorus.) comes home: our cause already has its champions beneath the earth, while the hands of our loathsome opponents, though they have the mastery, are unholy. The children have won the day.
- This has pierced the earth and reached your ear[*](The ear of Agamemnon.) as if it were an arrow. O Zeus, O Zeus, who send long-deferred retribution up from below onto the reckless and wicked deeds done by the hands of mortals. . . .
- And yet it will be accomplished for our father’s sake.[*](He thus justifies his (unvoiced) prayer, slay my mother)
- May it be mine to raise a hearty shout in triumph over the man when he is stabbed and over the woman as she perishes! Why should I try to keep hidden what nevertheless hovers before my soul?
- Full against the prow of my heart wrath blows sharply in rancorous hate.
- And when will mighty Zeus bring down his hand on them
- and split their heads open? Let it be a pledge to the land! After injustice I demand justice as my right. Hear, O Earth, and you honored powers below!
- And it is the eternal rule that drops of blood spilled on the ground demand yet more blood. Murder cries out on the Fury, which from those killed before brings one ruin in the wake of another.
- Alas, you sovereign powers of the world below, behold, you potent Curses of the slain, behold the remnants of the line of Atreus in their helpless plight, cast out from house and home in dishonor. Which way can we turn, O Zeus?
- But again my heart throbs as I hear this pitiful lament. At once I am devoid of hope and my viscera are darkened at the words I hear.