For she, constrained to leave her green leaves, laments pitifully her accustomed haunts, and composes the tale of her own child’s doom—how he perished, destroyed by her own hand, victim of the wrath of an unnatural mother.

Chorus Even so I, indulging my grief in Ionian strains,pain my tender face summered by Nile’s sun and my heart unexercised in tears; and I gather the flowers of grief, anxious whether there is any friendly kinsman here to champion our bandwhich has fled from the haze-shrouded land.