Page:Sophocles - Seven Plays, 1900.djvu/81

134–156]

Telamonian child, whose hand

Guards our wave-encircled land,

8alamis that breasts the sea,

Good of thine is joy to me;

But if One who reigns above

Smite thee, or if murmurs move

From fierce Danaäns in their hate

Full of threatening to thy state,

All my heart for fear doth sigh,

Shrinking like a dove’s soft eye.

Hardly had the darkness waned,

When our ears were filled and pained

With huge scandal on thy fame.

Telling, thine the arm that came

To the cattle-browsèd mead,

Wild with prancing of the steed,

And that ravaged there and slew

With a sword of fiery hue

All the spoils that yet remain,

By the sweat of spearmen ta’en.

Such report against thy life,

Whispered words with falsehood rife,

Wise Odysseus bringing near

Shrewdly gaineth many an ear:

Since invention against thee

Findeth hearing speedily,

Tallying with the moment’s birth;

And with loudly waxing mirth

Heaping insult on thy grief,

Each who hears it glories more

Than the tongue that told before.

Every slander wins belief

Aimed at souls whose worth is chief:

Shot at me, or one so small,

Such a bolt might harmless fall.