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.HeraclesApollo! what a prelude to your story!MegaraMy brothers are dead, and my old father.HeraclesHow so? what did he do? whose spear did he meet?MegaraLycus, our new monarch, slew him.HeraclesDid he meet him in fair fight, or was the land sick and weak?MegaraYes, from faction; now he is master of the city of Cadmus with its seven gates.HeraclesWhy has panic fallen on you and my aged father?MegaraHe meant to kill your father, me, and my children.HeraclesWhat are you saying? What did he have to fear from my orphan babes?MegaraHe was afraid they might some day avenge Creon’s death.HeraclesWhat is this dress they wear, suited to the dead?MegaraIt is the garb of death we have already put on.HeraclesAnd were you being forced to die? O woe is me!MegaraYes, deserted by every friend, and informed that you were dead.HeraclesWhat put such desperate thoughts into your heads?MegaraThat was what the heralds of Eurystheus kept proclaiming.HeraclesWhy did you leave my hearth and home?MegaraHe forced us; your father was dragged from his bed.HeraclesHad he no shame, to ill-use the old man so?MegaraShame indeed! that goddess and he dwell far enough apart.HeraclesWas I so poor in friends in my absence?MegaraWho are the friends of a man in misfortune?HeraclesDo they make so light of my hard warring with the Minyans?MegaraMisfortune, to repeat it to you, has no friends.HeraclesCast 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