Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/170

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142
EURIPIDES.

Yea, rang where Simois' waters flow,
For Atreus' sons was its weal made woe810
For the fruit of the curse sown long ago,
When on Tantalus' sons came, misery-breeding,
The strife for the lamb of the golden fleece,—
Breeding a banquet, with horrors spread,
For the which was the blood of a king's babes shed,
Whence murder, tracking the footsteps red
Of murder, haunts with the wound aye bleeding
The Atreides twain without surcease.

(Ant.)

O deed fair-seeming, O deed unholy!—
With hand steel-armed through the throat to shear
Of a mother, and unto the sun to show
The blade dark-crimsoned with murder's blow!—820
Though vile, though frantic as madness-throe
Was the mother's crime, the transgressors' folly.[1]
Ah, Tyndareus' daughter, in frenzied fear
Of death, shrieked, shrieked in her anguish dread,
"Son, slaying thy mother, the right dost thou tread
Under foot! O beware lest thy grace to the dead,
Thy sire, in dishonour enwrap thee wholly,
As a fire that for ever thy name shall sear!"830

(Epode.)

What affliction were greater, what cause of weeping,
What pitiful sorrow in any land,
Than a son in the blood of a mother steeping
His hand? How in madness's bacchanal leaping
He is whirled, for the deed that was wrought of his hand,

  1. i.e. That of the adulterous pair Klytemnestra and Aegisthus.