Heracles Mad (1246-1260)

What will you do? Where is your fury drifting you?

I will die and return to that world below from which I have just come.

Such language is fit for any common fellow.

Ah! yours is the advice of one outside sorrow.

Are these indeed the words of Heracles, the much-enduring?

Though never so much as this. Endurance must have a limit.

Is this the benefactor and great friend to mortals?

Mortals bring no help to me; no! Hera has her way.

Never would Hellas allow you to die through sheer perversity.

Hear me a moment, that I may enter the contest with arguments in answer to your admonitions; and I will unfold to you why life now as well as formerly has been unbearable to me. First I am the son of a man who incurred the guilt of blood, before he married my mother Alcmena,

by slaying her aged father. Now when the foundation is badly laid at birth, it is necessary for the race to be cursed with woe; and Zeus, whoever this Zeus may be, begot me as an enemy to Hera; yet do not be vexed, old man;