Chorus.
She grows presageful of her woes to come,
Slave tho' she be, instinct with prophecy.
Cassandra.
Apollo, Apollo!
God of all ways, but only Death's to me,
O thou Apollo, thou Destroyer named!
What way hast led me, to what evil home?
Chorus.
Know'st thou it not? The home of Atreus' race:
Take these my words for sooth and ask no more.
Cassandra.
Home cursed of God! Bear witness unto me,
Ye visioned woes within—
The blood-stained hands of them that smite their kin—
The strangling noose, and, spattered o'er
With human blood, the reeking floor!
Chorus.
How like a sleuth-hound questing on the track,
Keen-scented unto blood and death she hies!
lastly, grave with the pathos of confronted death,—
τί δῆτ᾽ ἐγὼ κάτοικος ὧδ᾽ ἀναστένω;
ἐπεὶ τὸ πρῶτον εἶδον Ἰλίου πόλιν
πράξασαν ὡς ἔπραξεν· οἵ δ᾽ εἶχον πόλιν
οὕτως ἀπαλλάσσουσιν ἐν θεῶν κρίσει.
ἰοῦσα πράξω, τλήσομαι τὸ κατθανεῖν.
Here, therefore, the translator may be allowed to fall back upon the humbler task of telling the reader what is to be found in the original, before endeavouring to call up its ghost in English. Πολλὰ φρονέοντα μηδένος κρατέειν, is not a bad account of the process of translation, and nowhere more applicable than here.
