Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/370

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342
EURIPIDES.

The grave's life nothingness! Who prays to die
Is mad. Ill life o'erpasseth glorious death.[1]


Chorus.

O thou wretch Helen! Through thee and thy sin
Comes agony on the Atreids and their seed.


Agamemnon.

I know what asketh pity, what doth not, 1255
Who love mine own babes: I were madman else.
Awful it is, my wife, to dare this deed,
Yet awful to forbear. I must do this!
Mark ye yon countless host with galleys fenced,
And all the brazen-harnessed Hellene kings, 1260
For whom no voyaging is to Ilium's towers,
But by thy blood, as Kalchas saith, the seer,
Nor may we raze Troy's citadel renowned.
A fiery passion maddeneth Hellas' host
To sail in all haste to the aliens' land, 1265
And put an end to rapes of Hellene wives.
My daughters will they slay in Argos—you
And me,—if I annul the Goddess' hest.
Not Menelaus hath enslaved me, child,
Nor yet to serve his pleasure have I come. 1270
'Tis Hellas for whom—will I, will I not—
I must slay thee: this cannot we withstand.
Free must she be, so far as in thee lies,

  1. ↑ "Come not unto me with thy babble of comfort in death!
    Rather would I be a hireling to drudge in the fields all day
    With a landless master, who sparely would feed me, and niggardly pay,
    Than over the hosts of the dead which have died a sceptre to sway."
    Odyssey, xi, 488—491.
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