Thou wretch, what face hast thou to utter this?1290
And know'st thou not the father that begat
Thy father, Pelops, was of alien blood,
A Phrygian born, of old;[1] that Atreus, he
Who gave thee life, was godless in his deeds,
And placed before his brother banquet foul
Of his own children's flesh; and thou thyself
Wast born of Cretan mother, whom her sire,
Detecting with the alien, headlong cast
A prey to voiceless fishes? And dost thou,
Such as thou art, reproach me with my birth,
Such as I am, who, on my father's side,
From Telamon am sprung, who gained the prize
Of all the host for valour, and obtained1300
My mother as a concubine, who claimed
A kingly birth from old Laomedon,
And whom Alcmena's son as chosen gift
Gave to my father? And should I, thus sprung
Noble, from noblest, shame my kith and kin,
Whom now, in such ill plight as this enwrapt,
Thou thrustest out unburied, and dost feel
No shame to speak it? But of this be sure,
If ye will cast him forth, ye will cast, too,
Us three around him clinging; for 'twere good,
Striving for him to die in open fight,1310
*Much rather than for that false wife of thine,[2]
- ↑ In one form of the Pelops mythos, Thyestes, the brother of Atreus, was the adulterer, and Atreus drowned the adulteress. Here, however, Sophocles follows the legend which made Aerope, while yet in Crete, guilty of unchastity, and condemned by her father, Cratreus, to die by drowning. The executioner spared her life, and she afterwards married Atreus.
- ↑ So the text stands, yet the Trojan war was waged, not for the wife of Agamemnon, but for Helen, the wife of Menelaos. There may, perhaps, be a taunt implied in the phrase, implying either (1.) that Agamemnon fought for Helen as if he were her husband, or (2.) that he was urged to the war by bis own wife, the sister of Helen.
