Euripides' PHOENISSAE Complete

Translated by E. Coleridge.

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Chorus: (chanting) No longer do the misfortunes of this house extend
to hearsay only; three corpses of the slain lie here at the palace
for all to see, who by one common death have passed to their life
of gloom. (During the lament, Antigone enters, followed by servants
who hear the bodies Of Jocasta, Eteocles, and Polyneices.)

Antigone: (chanting) No veil I draw o'er my tender cheek shaded with
its clustering curls; no shame I feel from maiden modesty at the hot
blood mantling 'neath my eyes, the blush upon my face, as I hurry
wildly on in death's train, casting from my hair its tire and letting
my delicate robe of saffron hue fly loose, a tearful escort to the
dead. Ah me!

Woe to thee, Polyneices! rightly named, I trow; woe to thee, Thebes!
no mere strife to end in strife was thine; but murder completed by
murder hath brought the house of Oedipus to ruin with bloodshed dire
and grim. O my home, my home! what minstrel can I summon from the
dead to chant a fitting dirge o'er my tearful fate, as I bear these
three corpses of my kin, my mother and her sons, welcome sight to
the avenging fiend that destroyed the house of Oedipus, root and branch,
in the hour that his shrewdness solved the Sphinx's riddling rhyme
and slew that savage songstress. Woe is me! my father! what other
Hellene or barbarian, what noble soul among the bygone tribes of man's
poor mortal race ever endured the anguish of such visible afflictions?

Ah! poor maid, how piteous is thy plaint! What bird from its covert
'mid the leafy oak or soaring pine-tree's branch will come to mourn
with me, the maid left motherless, with cries of woe, lamenting, ere
it comes, the piteous lonely life, that henceforth must be always
mine with tears that ever stream? On which of these corpses shall
I throw my offerings first, plucking the hair from my head? on the
breast of the mother that suckled me, or beside the ghastly death-wounds
of my brothers' corpses? Woe to thee, Oedipus, my aged sire with sightless
orbs, leave thy roof, disclose the misery of thy life, thou that draggest
out a weary existence within the house, having cast a mist of darkness
o'er thine eyes. Dost hear, thou whose aged step now gropes its way
across the court, now seeks repose on wretched pallet couch? (Oedipus
enters from the palace. He chants the following lines responsively
with Antigone.)

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