Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/170

142 Yea, rang where Simois' waters flow,

For Atreus' sons was its weal made woe

For the fruit of the curse sown long ago,

When on Tantalus' sons came, misery-breeding,

The strife for the lamb of the golden fleece,—

Breeding a banquet, with horrors spread,

For the which was the blood of a king's babes shed,

Whence murder, tracking the footsteps red

Of murder, haunts with the wound aye bleeding

The Atreides twain without surcease. (Ant.) O deed fair-seeming, O deed unholy!—

With hand steel-armed through the throat to shear

Of a mother, and unto the sun to show

The blade dark-crimsoned with murder's blow!—

Though vile, though frantic as madness-throe

Was the mother's crime, the transgressors' folly.

Ah, Tyndareus' daughter, in frenzied fear

Of death, shrieked, shrieked in her anguish dread,

"Son, slaying thy mother, the right dost thou tread

Under foot! O beware lest thy grace to the dead,

Thy sire, in dishonour enwrap thee wholly,

As a fire that for ever thy name shall sear!" (Epode.) What affliction were greater, what cause of weeping,

What pitiful sorrow in any land,

Than a son in the blood of a mother steeping

His hand? How in madness's bacchanal leaping

He is whirled, for the deed that was wrought of his hand,