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 CHORUS

Would that you both might learn wisdom and temperance.

There is no better counsel I can give you.

TEUCER

Alas! how soon gratitude to the dead

Proves treacherous and vanishes from men's minds,

If for thee, Aias, this man has no more

The least word of remembrance, he for whom oft

Toiling in battle thou didst risk thy life.

But all that is forgotten and flung aside.

Thou who but now wast uttering so much folly,

Hast thou no memory left, how in that hour

When, pent within your lines, you were already

No more than men of nought, routed in battle,

He alone stood forth to save you, while the flames

Were blazing round the stern-decks of the ships

Already, and while Hector, leaping high

Across the trench, charged down upon the hulls?

Who checked this ruin? Was it not he, who nowhere

So much as stood beside thee, so thou sayest?

Would you deny he acted nobly there?

Or when again chosen by lot, unbidden,

Alone in single combat he met Hector?

For no runaway's lot did he cast in,

No lump of clammy earth, but such that first

It should leap lightly from the crested helm?

His were these exploits; and beside him stood

I, the slave, the barbarian mother's son.

Wretch, with what face can you fling forth such taunts?

Know you not that of old your father's father

Was Pelops, a barbarian, and a Phrygian?

That your sire Atreus set before his brother

A feast most impious of his own children's flesh?

And from a Cretan mother you were born,

Whom when her father found her with a paramour.

He doomed her for dumb fishes to devour.