Heracles Mad (534-575)

We are being ruined; forgive me, old friend,

if I have anticipated that to which you had a right to tell him; for women’s nature is perhaps more prone to grief than men’s and they are my children that were being led to death, which was my own lot too.

Apollo! what a prelude to your story!

My brothers are dead, and my old father.

How so? what did he do? whose spear did he meet?

Lycus, our new monarch, slew him.

Did he meet him in fair fight, or was the land sick and weak?

Yes, from faction; now he is master of the city of Cadmus with its seven gates.

Why has panic fallen on you and my aged father?

He meant to kill your father, me, and my children.

What are you saying? What did he have to fear from my orphan babes?

He was afraid they might some day avenge Creon’s death.

What is this dress they wear, suited to the dead?

It is the garb of death we have already put on.

And were you being forced to die? O woe is me!

Yes, deserted by every friend, and informed that you were dead.

What put such desperate thoughts into your heads?

That was what the heralds of Eurystheus kept proclaiming.

Why did you leave my hearth and home?

He forced us; your father was dragged from his bed.

Had he no shame, to ill-use the old man so?

Shame indeed! that goddess and he dwell far enough apart.

Was I so poor in friends in my absence?

Who are the friends of a man in misfortune?

Do they make so light of my hard warring with the Minyans?

Misfortune, to repeat it to you, has no friends.

Cast from your heads these chaplets of death, look up to the light, for instead of the darkness below your eyes behold the welcome sun.

I, meanwhile, since here is work for my hand, will first go raze this upstart tyrant’s halls, and when I have beheaded the villain, I will throw him to dogs to tear; and every Theban who I find has played the traitor after my kindness,

will I destroy with this victorious club; the rest will I tear apart with my feathered shafts and fill Ismenus full of bloody corpses, and Dirce’s clear stream shall run red with gore. For whom ought I to help rather than wife

and children and aged father? Farewell my labors! for it was in vain I accomplished them rather than helping these. And yet I ought to die in their defence, since they for their father were doomed; or what shall we find so noble in having fought a hydra and a lion