Polyxena.
O stricken of anguish beyond all other!
O filled with affliction of desolate days!
What tempest, what tempest of outrage and shame,200
Too loathly to look on, too awful to name,
Hath a fiend uproused, that on thee it came,
That thy woeful child by her woeful mother
Nevermore down thraldom's paths shall pace!
For me, like a youngling mountain-pastured,
Like a child of the herd, shalt thou see torn far,
In woe from thy woeful embraces torn,
And, with throat by the steel of the altar shorn,
Down to the underworld darkness borne,
In the Land Unseen to lie, overmastered
Of misery, there where the death-stricken are.210
For thee, for the dark days closing around thee,
Mother, with uttermost wailings I cry:
But for this, the life that I now must lack,
For all the ruin thereof and the wrack,
I wail not, I, as I gaze aback:—
O nay, but a happier lot hath found me,
Forasmuch as to me it is given to die.
Chorus.
But lo, Odysseus comes with hurrying foot,
To tell thee, Hecuba, the new decree,
Enter Odysseus.
Odysseus.
Lady, thou know'st, I trow, the host's resolve,
And the vote cast, yet will I tell it thee:
The Achaians will to slay Polyxena220
