Heracles Mad (1060b-1115)

Is he sleeping?

Yes, he is sleeping, a deadly sleepless sleep, having slain wife and children with the arrows of his twanging bow.

Ah! mourn—

Indeed I do.

The children’s death—

Ah me!

And your own son’s doom.

Alas!

Old friend—

Hush! hush! he is turning over, he is waking! Oh!

let me hide myself, concealed beneath the roof.

Courage! darkness still holds your son’s eye.

Oh beware! it is not that I shrink from leaving the light after my miseries, poor wretch! but if should he slay me, his father,

then he will be devising mischief on mischief, and to the avenging curse will add a parent’s blood.

Well for you if you had died in that day, when, for your wife, you went forth to exact vengeance for her slain brothers

by sacking the Taphians’ sea-beat town.

Fly, fly, my aged friends, from before the palace, escape his waking fury. Or soon he will heap up fresh slaughter on the old,

ranging wildly once more through the streets of Thebes.

O Zeus, why have you shown such savage hate against your own son and plunged him in this sea of troubles?

Aha! I am alive and breathing; and my eyes resume their function, opening on

the sky and earth and the sun’s darting beam; but how my senses reel! in what strange turmoil am I plunged! my fevered breath in quick spasmodic gasps escapes my lungs. How now? why am I lying here, my brawny chest and arms made fast with cables like a ship,

beside a half-shattered piece of masonry, with corpses for my neighbors; while over the floor my bow and arrows are scattered, that once like trusty squires to my arm

both kept me safe and were kept safe by me? Surely I have not come a second time to Hades’ halls, having just returned from there for Eurystheus? To Hades? From where? No, I do not see Sisyphus with his stone, or Pluto, or his queen, Demeter’s child.

Surely I am distraught; where am I, so helpless? Ho, there! which of my friends is near or far to cure me in my perplexity? For I have no clear knowledge of things once familiar.

My aged friends, shall I approach the scene of my sorrow?

Yes, and let me go with you, not desert you in your trouble.

Father, why do you weep and veil your eyes, standing far from your beloved son?

My child! mine still, for all your misery.

Why, what is there so sad in my case that you weep?

That which might make any of the gods weep, if he were to learn it.