Yet heaven, if it pleases, may still turn our utterance to more joyfully sounding strains. In place of dirges over a tomb, a song of triumph within the royal halls will welcome back a reunited friend.νεοκρᾶτα,newly-mixed. As friendship, when begun, was pledged by a loving-cup, so Orestes, after his long absence, is to be welcomed as a new friend.

OrestesAh, my father, if only beneath Ilium’s walls you had been slain, slashed by some Lycian spearman! Then you would have left a good name for your children in their halls,and in their maturity you would have made their lives admired by men. And in a land beyond the sea you would have found a tomb heaped high with earth, no heavy burden for your house to bear—

Chorus—Welcomed there below by your comradeswho nobly fell, a ruler of august majesty, distinguished even beneath the earth, and minister of the mightiest, the deities who rule in the nether world.Pluto and Proserpine.For in your life you were a king of those who have the power to assign the portion of death,He was a king of those princes who have the right to apportion life or death to their subjects. and who wield the staff all mortals obey.

ElectraNo, not even beneath the walls of Troy, father, would I wish you to have fallen and to be entombed beside Scamander’s waters among the rest of the host slain by the spear. I wish rather that his murderers had been killed by their own loved ones, just as they killed you, so that someone in a distant land who knew nothing of these present troubles should learn of their fatal doom.

ChorusIn this, my child, your wish is better than gold. It surpasses great good fortune, even that of the supremely blesssed;The Hyperboreans, a fabulous people dwelling beyond the North wind, were imagined to live longer and in greater felicity than other mortals. for it is easy to wish.But now the lash of this double scourgeThe lash of this double scourge refers to the appeal to the dead, lashing him to vengenace, to the beating of the head and breast, and to the stamping open the ground, which, like the invocation of the dead, were intended to arouse the nether powers. The scourge is double (cp. 647) because the participants in the scene are the two children (l. 334) and the Chorus. comes home: our cause already has its champions beneath the earth, while the hands of our loathsome opponents, though they have the mastery, are unholy. The children have won the day.

OrestesThis has pierced the earth and reached your earThe ear of Agamemnon. as if it were an arrow. O Zeus, O Zeus, who send long-deferred retribution up from below onto the reckless and wicked deeds done by the hands of mortals. . . . And yet it will be accomplished for our father’s sake.He thus justifies his (unvoiced) prayer, slay my mother

ChorusMay it be mine to raise a hearty shout in triumph over the man when he is stabbed and over the woman as she perishes! Why should I try to keep hidden what nevertheless hovers before my soul?Full against the prow of my heart wrath blows sharply in rancorous hate.

ElectraAnd when will mighty Zeus bring down his hand on themand split their heads open? Let it be a pledge to the land! After injustice I demand justice as my right. Hear, O Earth, and you honored powers below!

ChorusAnd it is the eternal rule that drops of blood spilled on the ground demand yet more blood. Murder cries out on the Fury, which from those killed before brings one ruin in the wake of another.

OrestesAlas, you sovereign powers of the world below, behold, you potent Curses of the slain, behold the remnants of the line of Atreus in their helpless plight, cast out from house and home in dishonor. Which way can we turn, O Zeus?

ChorusBut again my heart throbs as I hear this pitiful lament. At once I am devoid of hope and my viscera are darkened at the words I hear.But when hope once again lifts and strengthens me, it puts away my distress and dawns brightly on me.

ElectraTo what could we more fittingly appeal than to those very miseries we have endured from the woman herself who bore us?She may fawn upon us, but they are past all soothing. For like a fierce-hearted wolf the temper we have acquired from our mother is implacable.

ChorusOn my breast I beatAt the time of Agamemnon’s murder, when the women wailed with the extravagance of professional Asiatic mourners. Here they repeat those signs of mourning. an ArianAria was a district of Persia. For Eranians (Old-Persian ariya) the Greeks used Ἄριοι; at least Herodotus says this was an ancient name of the Medes. dirge in just the same fashion as a CissianCissia formed part of Susiana. wailing woman.With clenched fists, raining blows thick and fast, my outstretched hands could be seen descending from above, from far above, now on this side, now on that, till my battered and wretched head resounded with the strokes.

ElectraAway with you, cruel and utterly brazen mother! You dared to give your husband a most cruel burial: unmourned, without lamentation, a king unattended by his people.

OrestesAh me, your words spell utter dishonor.Yet with the help of the gods, and with the help of my own hands, will she not atone for the dishonor she did my father? Let me only take her life, then let me die!

ChorusYes, and I would have you know he was brutally mangled.An allusion to the savage custom by which the extremities of the murdered man were cut off, then hung about his neck and tied together under the arm-pits (μασχάλαι). At least one object of this arm-pitting was to disable the spirit of the dead from taking vengeance on the murderer.