Yea, rang where Simois' waters flow,
For Atreus' sons was its weal made woe810
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!—820
Though vile, though frantic as madness-throe
Was the mother's crime, the transgressors' folly.[1]
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!"830
(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,
- ↑ i.e. That of the adulterous pair Klytemnestra and Aegisthus.
