The Chorus answers him. It is a dream that has made her anxious. She dreamt that she gave birth to a dragon, who fed with his savage jaws at her own breast. She sprang up in terror, and could not rest till these libations had been sent to her husband's tomb. Even to Clytemnestra remorse has come at last, and conscience makes her connect every terror with her crime. She could not know what this dragon meant, but Orestes accepts it as a type of himself:—
"For if the snake, quitting the self-same womb,
Was girded straightway with my swathing-clothes,
And, gaping round the breast that nourished me,
Sucked with my nurture-milk the clotted blood,
While she in terror, at the portent shrieked;—
Needs must it be, that she who reared the pest
A forceful death must die. I, dragon-like,
Myself shall slay her, as her dream declares."
No more is needed to strengthen his resolution or to sanction it, and now he unfolds the details of his plot. With the faithful Pylades, who has never left his side, he is to present himself as a stranger at the gates of the palace, and so to gain admission to the presence of Ægisthus. Then, so soon as he sees the usurper, he will kill him. Such is his plan. Of his mother he says not a word. That intention is too dreadful to be spoken of: though unhesitating in his determination, he will not utter it, even to his friends. Surely there is something very touching and dreadful in this silence.
Orestes and Pylades go away into the fields, to
