The parents that have perished miserably;
Far better pleaseth me
The wailing one who "Itys, Itys,"[1] mourns,
The bird heartbroken, messenger of Zeus.
Ah, Niobe![2] with all thy countless woes150
I count thee still divine,
Who in thy tomb of rock
Weepest for evermore.
Chor. Not unto thee alone,
My child, of those that live
Have grief and sorrow come;
Nor sufferest thou ought more than those within
With whom thou sharest home and kith and kin,
Iphianassa and Chrysothemis;
And one is mourning in a youth obscure,
Yet happy, too, in part,
Whom one day the Mykenians' glorious land160
Shall welcome as the heir of noble race,
Coming to this our soil,
As sent by grace of Zeus,
Orestes, come at last.
Elec. Ah! him I wait for with unwearied hope,
And go, ah! piteous fate!
Childless, unwedded still;
My cheeks are wet with tears,
- ↑ The cry of "Itys," which the Greek ear found in the song of the nightingale, connected itself with the story of Tereus, king of Thrace, who married Procne, daughter of Pandion, king of Athens. Then doing violence to her sister Philomela, he tore out her tongue and imprisoned her, that she might not tell of the outrage. She, however, found means to tell her sister Procne by a piece of tapestry-work, and she, wroth with Tereus, slew his son Itys, and gave his flesh to his father that he might eat it. And then Zeus put forth his power, and changed Philomela into a nightingale, and Procne into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoo, and so the nightingale ever flies from the hoopoo and wails for Itys. Sophocles had dramatised the history in his Tereus, probably before the date of the Electra.
- ↑ Niobe—comp. the note on Antigone, 823.
