Sent forth from the palace I have come to convey libations to the sound of sharp blows of my hands. My cheek is marked with bloody gasheswhere my nails have cut fresh furrows. And yet through all my life my heart is fed with lamentation. Rips are torn by my griefs through the linen web of my garment, torn in the cloth that covers my breast,the cloth of robes struck for the sake of my mirthless misfortunes.

ChorusFor with a hair-raising shriek, Terror, the diviner of dreams for our house, breathing wrath out of sleep, uttered a cry of terror in the dead of night from the heart of the palace,a cry that fell heavily on the women’s quarter.The language of the passage is accommodated to a double purpose: (1) to indicate an oracular deliverance on the part of the inspired prophetess at Delphi, and (2) to show the alarming nature of Clytaemestra’s dream: while certain limiting expressions (as ἀωπόνυκτον, ὕπτου) show the points of difference. Phoebus is used for a prophetic possession, which assails Clytaemestra as a nightmare (cp. βαρὺς πίτνων); so that her vision is itself called an ὀνειρόμαντις. And the readers of these dreams, bound under pledge, cried out from the god that those