Page:Four Plays of Aeschylus (Cookson).djvu/34

22

No easy judgment: choose not me for judge.

Have I not said without the people's voice

I will not and I cannot, King though I be,

Do as thou'lt have me do? I will not hear—

If it should chance that aught untoward fall—

Reproachful commons cast it in my teeth

'To honour strangers thou didst wreck thy land!'

Ancestral Zeus, of both blood-kin,

Eyes suppliant and pursuer:

The ponderable stuff of sin

Is charged to the wrong doer;

Quick is the tell-tale hand to mount

And reckon to the just's account

The fair record of righteousness.

Since equal is the poise why shrink from fair redress?

This asks deep thought: an eye within the mind,

Keen as a diver salving sunken freight,

To sink into the depths, yet, searching there,

Not lose itself in roving phantasies;

That all end well and mischief follow not

First for the State, which is our chief concern,

Then for ourselves; and neither war lay hold

On loot to pay your loss, nor by our act,

If from this seat of Gods that ye have made

Your seat, we yield you up, the land be crushed

By haunting visitations of the God

Whose business is destruction, Alastor,

The unforgetting instrument of wrath,