Page:Sophocles - Seven Plays, 1900.djvu/112

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I understand not in the barbarous tongue,

And all thy talk sounds nonsense to mine ear.

. Would ye might both have sense to curb your ire!

No better hope for either can I frame.

. Fie! How doth gratitude when men are dead

Prove renegade and swiftly pass away!

This Agamemnon hath no slightest word

Of kind remembrance any more for thee,

Aias, who oftentimes for his behoof

Hast jeoparded thy life in labour of war.

Now all is clean forgotten and out of mind.

Thou who hast multiplied words void of sense,

Hast thou no faintest memory of the time

When who but Aias came and rescued you

Already locked within the toils,—all lost,

The rout began: when close abaft the ships

The torches flared, and o’er the bootless trench

Hector was bounding high to board our fleet?

Who stayed that onset? Was not Aias he?

Whom thou deny’st to have once set foot by thine.

Find ye no merit there? And once again

When he met Hector singly, man to man,

Not by your bidding, but the lottery’s choice,

His lot, that skulked not low adown i’ the heap,

A moist earth-clod, but sure to spring in air,

And first to clear the plumy helmet’s brim.

Yes, Aias was the man, and I too there

Kept rank, the ‘barbarous mother’s servile son.’

I pity thee the blindness of that word.

Who was thy father's father? A barbarian,

Pelops, the Phrygian, if you trace him far!

And what was Atreus, thine own father? One

Who served his brother with the abominable

Dire feast of his own flesh. And thou thyself

Cam’st from a Cretan mother, whom her sire

Caught with a man who had no right in her

And gave dumb fishes the polluted prey.

Such was thy race. What is the race thou spurnest?

My father, Telamon, of all the host

Being foremost proved in valour, took as prize