Page:Sophocles - Seven Plays, 1900.djvu/218

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. He took them for the service of the Gods

And his own house, when high Oechalia fell.

. Was’t then before that city he was kept

Those endless ages of uncounted time?

. Not so. The greater while he was detained

Among the Lydians, sold, as he declares,

To bondage. Nor be jealous of the word,

Since Heaven, my Queen, was author of the deed.

Enthralled so to Asian Omphalè,

He, as himself avers, fulfilled his year.

The felt reproach whereof so chafed his soul,

He bound fierce curses on himself and sware

That,—children, wife and all,—he yet would bring

In captive chains the mover of this harm.

Nor did this perish like an idle word,

But, when the stain was off him, straight he drew

Allied battalions to assault the town

Of Eurytus, whom, sole of earthly powers,

He had noted as the source of his annoy,

Because, having received him in his hall

A guest of ancient days, he burst on him

With outrage of loud voice and villanous mind.

Saying, ‘with his hand upon the unerring bow,

Oechalia’s princes could o’ershoot his skill;

And born to bondage, he must quail beneath

His overlord’; lastly, to crown this cry,

When at a banquet he was filled with wine,

He flung him out of door. Whereat being wroth,

When Iphitus to the Tirynthian height

Followed the track where his brood-mares had strayed,

He, while the thought and eye of the man by chance

Were sundered, threw him from the tower-crowned cliff.

In anger for which deed the Olympian King,

Father of Gods and men, delivered him

To be a bond-slave, nor could brook the offence,

That of all lives he vanquished, this alone

Should have been ta’en by guile. For had he wrought

In open quittance of outrageous wrong,

Even Zeus had granted that his cause was just.

The braggart hath no favour even in Heaven.