Yes, the curses of Oedipus have made it seethe in fury.Too true were the phantoms in my sleeping visions, predicting the division of our father’s wealth!

ChorusObey us women, although you do not like to. EteoclesRecommend something that can be accomplished; your request need not be lengthy. ChorusDo not yourself take the road to the seventh gate! EteoclesLet me assure you, you will not blunt my sharpened purpose with words. ChorusAnd yet any victory, even a cowardly one, is nonetheless held in honor by God. EteoclesA soldier must not embrace that maxim. ChorusBut are you willing to harvest the blood of your own brother? EteoclesWhen it is the gods who give you evils, you cannot flee them. Exit.

ChorusI shudder in terror at the goddess who lays ruin to homes, a goddess unlike other divinities, who is an unerring omen of evil to come. I shudder that the Erinys invoked by the father’s prayer will fulfil the over-wrathful curses that Oedipus spoke in madness. This strife that will destroy his sons drives the Erinys to fulfillment.

ChorusA stranger distributes their inheritance, a Chalybian immigrant from Scythia, a bitter divider of wealth,savage-hearted iron that apportions land for them to dwell in, as much as they can occupy in death when they have lost their share in these wide plains.

ChorusBut when both have died, each killingthe other in mutual slaughter, and the earth’s dust has swallowed the black streams of their blood, who could offer sacrifice that might make purification? Who could cleanse them of their pollution?O, the new troubles of this house mixed with its evils of before!

ChorusIndeed I speak of the ancient transgression, now swift in its retribution. It remains even into the third generation,ever since Laius—in defiance of Apollo who, at his Pythian oracle at the earth’s center, said three times that the king would save his city if he died without offspring—

ChorusEver since he, overcome by the thoughtlessness of his longing, fathered his own death, the parricide Oedipus, who sowed his mother’s sacred field, where he was nurtured,and endured a bloody crop. Madness united the frenzied bridal pair.

ChorusNow it is as if a sea of evils pushes its swell onward. As one wave sinks, the sea raises up another,triple-crested, which crashes around the city’s stern. In between a narrow defense stretches—no wider than a wall. I fear that the city will be overthrown along with its kings.

ChorusFor the compensation is heavy when curses uttered long ago are fulfilled, and once the deadly curse has come into existence, it does not pass away. When the fortune of seafaring merchants has grown too great,it must be thrown overboard.

ChorusFor whom have the gods and divinities that share their altar and the thronging assembly of men ever admiredso much as they honored Oedipus then, when he removed that deadly, man-seizing plague from our land?

ChorusBut when, his sanity regained, he grew miserable in his wretchedmarriage, then carried away by his grief and with maddened heart he accomplished a double evil. With the hand that killed his father he struck out his eyes, which were dearer to him than his children.

ChorusNext he launched brutal, wrathful words against the sons he had bred—ah! curses from a bitter tongue—that wielding iron in their hands they would one day divide his property.