Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/154

126 In lawless and in wanton dalliance

Sought to a lover:—mine own shame I speak

In telling hers, yet will I utter it:—

Aegisthus was that secret paramour.

I slew him and my mother on one altar—

Sinning, yet taking vengeance for my sire.

In that, for which thou threatenest stoning's doom,

Hear, how I rendered service to all Greece:

If wives to this bold recklessness shall come,

To slay their husbands, and find refuge then

With sons, entrapping pity with bared breasts,

Then shall they count it nought to slay their lords,

On whatso plea may chance. By deeds of horror—

As thy large utterance is—I annulled this law.

In righteous hate my mother did I slay,

Who, when her lord was warring far from home,

Chief of our armies, for all Hellas' sake,

Betrayed him, kept his couch not undefiled.

When her sin found her out, she punished not

Herself, but, lest her lord should punish her,

Wreaked on my father chastisement, and slew.

By Heaven!—ill time, I grant, to name the Gods,

Defending murder,—had I justified

Her deeds by silence, what had the dead done?

Had not his hate's Erinnyes haunted me?

Or on the mother's side fight Goddesses,

And none on his who suffered deeper wrong?

Thou, ancient, in begetting a vile daughter,

Didst ruin me; for, through her recklessness

Unfathered, I became a matricide.

Mark this—Odysseus' wife Telemachus

Slew not: she took no spouse while lived her lord,

But pure her couch abideth in her halls.