Agamemnon (1069-1145)

But I will not be angry, since I pity her.

Come, unhappy one, leave the car; yield to necessity and take upon you this novel yoke.

Woe, woe, woe! O Apollo, O Apollo!

Wherefore your cry of woe in Loxias’ name?

He is not the kind of god that has to do with mourners.

Woe, woe, woe! O Apollo, O Apollo!

Once more with ill-omened words she cries to the god who should not be present at times of lamentation.

Apollo, Apollo! God of the Ways,[*]my destroyer! For you have destroyed me—and utterly—this second time.[*]

I think that she is about to prophesy about her own miseries. The divine gift still abides even in the soul of one enslaved.

Apollo, Apollo! God of the Ways, my destroyer! Ah, what way is this that you have brought me! To what a house!

To that of Atreus’ sons. If you do not perceive this, I’ll tell it to you. And you shall not say that it is untrue.

No, no, rather to a god-hating house, a house that knows many a horrible butchery of kin, a slaughter-house of men and a floor swimming with blood.

The stranger seems keen-scented as a hound; she is on the trail where she will discover blood.

Here is the evidence in which I put my trust! Behold those babies bewailing their own butchery and their roasted flesh eaten by their father!

Your fame to read the future had reached our ears; but we have no need of prophets here.

Alas, what can she be planning[*]? What is this fresh woe she contrives here within, what monstrous, monstrous horror, beyond love’s enduring, beyond all remedy? And help[*]stands far away!

These prophesyings pass my comprehension; but those I understood—the whole city rings with them.

Ah, damned woman, will you do this thing? Your husband, the partner of your bed, when you have cheered him with the bath, will you—how shall I tell the end?

Soon it will be done. Now this hand, now that, she stretches forth!

Not yet do I comprehend; for now, after riddles, I am bewildered by dark oracles.

Ah! Ah! What apparition is this?

Is it a net of death? No, it is a snare that shares his bed, that shares the guilt of murder. Let the fatal pack, insatiable against the race, raise a shout of jubilance over a victim accursed![*]

What Spirit of Vengeance is this that you bid

raise its voice over this house? Your words do not cheer me. Back to my heart surge the drops of my pallid blood, even as when they drip from a mortal wound, ebbing away as life’s beams sink low; and death comes speedily.

Ah, ah, see there, see there! Keep the bull from his mate! She has caught him in the robe and gores him with the crafty device of her black horn! He falls in a vessel of water! It is of doom wrought by guile in a murderous bath that I am telling you.

I cannot boast that I am a keen judge of prophecies; but these, I think, spell some evil. But from prophecies what word of good ever comes to mortals? Through terms of evil their wordy arts

bring men to know fear chanted in prophetic strains.

Alas, alas, the sorrow of my ill-starred doom! For it is my own affliction, crowning the cup, that I bewail. Ah, to what end did you bring me here, unhappy as I am? For nothing except to die—and not alone. What else?

Frenzied in soul you are, by some god possessed, and you wail in wild strains your own fate, like that brown bird that never ceases making lament (ah me!), and in the misery of her heart moans Itys, Itys,

throughout all her days abounding in sorrow, the nightingale.