Page:Four Plays of Aeschylus (Cookson).djvu/19

Rh Zeus' daughter, vowed to maidenhead,

Look with a loving- eye on me,

That would keep chaste and pure as she,

Whose virgin arm the arrow sped

And slew the Hunter in his lust

Whom Opis tremblingly outran!

O maid unwon, a maiden grace

With all thy power in this sore chase,

That I, the seed of Zeus' spouse august,

May flee the violence of man

And live unlorded and unwed.

But, if these will not, then I will essay

The sun-loathed courts of Death,

Where never a sick soul is turned away

That wearies of this breath;

And, since Olympian Gods no help afford,

My corpse shall access find to Zeus, Earth's Lord,

When suppliant boughs shall be decked with the knotted cord.

Ah! Mother Io, thee wroth Gods amerce:

And of the courts celestial I know

That there dwell jealous wives who hate and curse;

For waves run high when breezes stiffly blow.

Then Right and Wrong shall be unreconciled;

And Justice shall upbraid

Zeus, that he honoured not the heifer's child,

Whom once of old he made,

If that at this late hour of time his eye

Be turnéd back when his own offspring cry: