Euripides Medea 1273

Jason

Ladies, stationed near this house, pray tell me is the author of these hideous deeds,

Medea, still within, or hath she fled from hence? For she must hide beneath the earth or soar on wings towards heaven’s vault, if she would avoid the vengeance of the royal house. Is she so sure she will escape herself unpunished from this house,

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when she hath slain the rulers of the land? But enough of this! I am forgetting her children. As for her, those whom she hath wronged will do the like by her; but I am come to save the children’s life, lest the victim’s kin visit their wrath on me, in vengeance for the murder foul,

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wrought by my children’s mother.

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Chorus

Unhappy man, thou knowest not the full extent of thy misery, else had thou never said those words.

Jason

How now? Can she want to kill me too?

Chorus

Thy sons are dead; slain by their own mother’s hand.

Jason

O God! what sayest thou? Woman, thou hast sealed my doom.

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Chorus

Thy children are no more; be sure of this.

Jason

Where slew she them; within the palace or outside?

Chorus

Throw wide the doors and see thy children’s murdered corpses.

Jason

Haste, ye slaves, loose the bolts,

undo the fastenings, that I may see the sight of twofold woe, my murdered sons and her, whose blood in vengeance I will shed. [Medea in mid air, on a chariot drawn by dragons; the children’s corpses by her.

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Medea

Why shake those doors and attempt to loose their bolts, in quest of the dead and me their murderess? From such toil desist. If thou wouldst aught with me,

say on, if so thou wilt; but never shalt thou lay hand on me, so swift the steeds the sun, my father’s sire, to me doth give to save me from the hand of my foes.

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Jason

Accursed woman! by gods, by me and all mankind abhorred as never woman was,

who hadst the heart to stab thy babes, thou their mother, leaving me undone and childless; this hast thou done and still dost gaze upon the sun and earth after this deed most impious. Curses on thee! I now perceive what then I missed

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in the day I brought thee, fraught with doom, from thy home in a barbarian land to dwell in Hellas, traitress to thy sire and to the land that nurtured thee. On me the gods have hurled the curse that dogged thy steps, for thou didst slay thy brother at his hearth

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ere thou cam’st aboard our fair ship Argo. Such was the outset of thy life of crime; then didst thou wed with me, and having born me sons to glut thy passion’s lust, thou now hast slain them. Not one amongst the wives of Hellas e’er had dared

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this deed; yet before them all I chose thee for my wife, wedding a foe to be my doom, no woman, but a lioness fiercer than Tyrrhene Scylla in nature. But with reproaches heaped a thousandfold

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I cannot wound thee, so brazen is thy nature. Perish, vile sorceress, murderess of thy babes! Whilst I must mourn my luckless fate, for I shall ne’er enjoy my new-found bride, nor shall I have the children,

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whom I bred and reared, alive to say the last farewell to me; nay, I have lost them.

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Medea

To this thy speech I could have made a long retort, but Father Zeus knows well all I have done for thee, and the treatment thou hast given me. Yet thou wert not ordained to scorn my love

and lead a life of joy in mockery of me, nor was thy royal bride nor Creon, who gave thee a second wife, to thrust me from this land and rue it not. Wherefore, if thou wilt, call me e’en a lioness, and Scylla, whose home is in the Tyrrhene land;

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for I in turn have wrung thy heart, as well I might.

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Jason

Thou, too, art grieved thyself, and sharest in my sorrow.

Medea

Be well assured I am; but it relieves my pain to know thou canst not mock at me.

Jason

O my children, how vile a mother ye have found!

Medea

My sons, your father’s feeble lust has been your ruin!

Jason

’Twas not my hand, at any rate, that slew them.

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Medea

No, but thy foul treatment of me, and thy new marriage.

Jason

Didst think that marriage cause enough to murder them?

Medea

Dost think a woman counts this a trifling injury?

Jason

So she be self-restrained; but in thy eyes all is evil.

Medea

Thy sons are dead and gone. That will stab thy heart.

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Jason

They live, methinks, ¹ to bring a curse upon thy head.

Medea

The gods know, whoso of them began this troublous coil.

Jason

Indeed, they know that hateful heart of thine.

Medea

Thou art as hateful. I am aweary of thy bitter tongue.

Jason

And I likewise of thine. But parting is easy.

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Medea

Say how; what am I to do? for I am fain as thou to go.

Jason

Give up to me those dead, to bury and lament

Medea

No, never! I will bury them myself, bearing them to Hera’s sacred field, who watches o’er the Cape,

that none of their foes may insult them by pulling down their tombs; and in this land of Sisyphus I will ordain hereafter a solemn feast and mystic rites to atone for this impious murder. Myself will now to the land of Erechtheus,

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to dwell with Aegeus, Pandion’s son. But thou, as well thou mayest, shalt die a caitiff’s death, thy head ² crushed ’neath a shattered relic of Argo, when thou hast seen the bitter ending of my marriage.

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