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Seven Against Thebes (717-750)

urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0085.tlg004.perseus-eng2:717-750
Refs {'start': {'reference': '717', 'human_reference': 'Line 717'}, 'end': {'reference': '750', 'human_reference': 'Line 750'}}
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A soldier must not embrace that maxim.
Chorus
But are you willing to harvest the blood of your own brother?
Eteocles
When it is the gods who give you evils, you cannot flee them. Exit.
720
Chorus
I 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.
727
Chorus
A 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.
734
Chorus
But when both have died, each killing
the 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!
742
Chorus
Indeed 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—
750
Chorus
Ever 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,

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