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CTS Library / Iphigenia Among the Tauri

Iphigenia Among the Tauri (95-190)

urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0006.tlg013.perseus-eng2:95-190
Refs {'start': {'reference': '95', 'human_reference': 'Line 95'}, 'end': {'reference': '190', 'human_reference': 'Line 190'}}
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Pylades, for you are my accomplice in this task, what shall we do? You see that the surrounding walls are high; shall we ascend the steps leading up to the house? But how might we escape notice? Or loosening the bronze bars of the door with levers,
of which we know nothing? If we are caught opening the gates and contriving an entrance, we shall die. No, but before we die, let us escape on the ship in which we sailed here.
Pylades
Flight is not to be endured, nor are we accustomed to it,
and we must not bring reproach on the god’s oracle; let us leave the temple and hide in a cave which the black sea washes with its moisture—far from the ship, so that no one, seeing it, may tell the ruler, and then seize us by force.
But when the eye of gloomy night comes on, then we must dare to take the polished statue from the shrine, by any means. See where between the triglyphs there is an empty space to let ourselves down. The brave endure their labors,
the cowardly are worth nothing at all.
Orestes
Yes, we did not come on a long sea voyage only to undertake a return home before the end; but you have spoken wel, we must obey. We should go wherever we can hide and escape notice.
For it will not be the god’s fault if his sacred oracle falls to the ground without effect. We must endure. Exeunt Orestes and Pylades.
123
Chorus
Keep a holy silence, you who inhabit the double clashing
rocks of the Black Sea!
O daughter of Leto, Dictynna of the mountains, to your hall, to the golden walls of your temple with beautiful pillars,
I, the servant of the holy key-holder, bend my holy virgin steps. For I have left the towers and walls of Hellas, famous for horses, and
Europe with its forests, my father’s home.
I have come. What is the news? What is troubling you? Why have you brought me, brought me to the shrine, you who are the daughter of Atreus’ son, master of a thousand ships and ten thousand soldiers,
who came to the towers of Troy with a famous fleet?
143
Iphigenia
Oh! My servants, how I am involved in mournful dirges,
in laments unfit for the lyre, of a song that is not melodious, alas! alas! wailing for my family. Ruin has come to me; I am lamenting the life of my brother,
such a vision I saw in my dreams, in the night whose darkness is now over.
I am lost, lost! My father’s house is no more; alas for my vanished family,
alas for the sufferings of Argos! O fate, I had one brother only and you carry him off and send him to Hades. For him,
I am about to pour over the back of the earth these libations and the bowl of the dead: streams of milk from mountain cows, and offerings of wine from Bacchus,
and the labor of the tawny bees; these sacrifices are soothing to the dead.
(To a servant) Give me the golden vessel and the libation of Hades.
O child of Agamemnon beneath the earth, I send these to you as one dead. Accept them; for I will not bring to your tomb my yellow hair or my tears.
I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.
178
Chorus
I will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and
a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead,
Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph.
Alas for the house of the Atreidae; the light of their scepter, alas, of the ancestral house, is lost. Once they ruled
as prosperous kings in Argos, but troubles dart out from troubles: Pelops, on his horses swiftly whirling, made his cast; the sun changed from its seat the holy beam of its rays.

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