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Cassandra
A clever fellow, this servant! Why is it heralds hold
the name they do? All men unite in hating with one common hate the attendants of kings or governments. You say my mother shall come to the halls of Odysseus? Where then are Apollo’s words, so clear to me in their interpretation, which declare
425
that she shall die here? What else remains, I will not taunt her with. Unhappy Odysseus, he does not know the sufferings that await him; or how these ills I and my Phrygians endure shall one day seem to him precious as gold. For beyond the ten long years spent at
Troy
he shall drag out other ten and then come to his country all alone . . .
430
where dreadful Charybdis lurks in a narrow channel between the rocks; past
Cyclops
the savage shepherd, and Ligurian Circe who turns men to swine; shipwrecked often upon the salt sea-wave; longing to eat the lotus, and the sacred cattle of the sun,
435
whose flesh shall utter in the days to come a human voice, bitter to Odysseus. In brief, he shall descend alive to Hades, and, though he shall escape the waters’ flood, yet shall he find a thousand troubles in his country when he arrives.
440
A clever fellow, this servant! Why is it heralds hold
the name they do? All men unite in hating with one common hate the attendants of kings or governments. You say my mother shall come to the halls of Odysseus? Where then are Apollo’s words, so clear to me in their interpretation, which declare
425
that she shall die here? What else remains, I will not taunt her with. Unhappy Odysseus, he does not know the sufferings that await him; or how these ills I and my Phrygians endure shall one day seem to him precious as gold. For beyond the ten long years spent at
Troy
he shall drag out other ten and then come to his country all alone . . .
430
where dreadful Charybdis lurks in a narrow channel between the rocks; past
Cyclops
the savage shepherd, and Ligurian Circe who turns men to swine; shipwrecked often upon the salt sea-wave; longing to eat the lotus, and the sacred cattle of the sun,
435
whose flesh shall utter in the days to come a human voice, bitter to Odysseus. In brief, he shall descend alive to Hades, and, though he shall escape the waters’ flood, yet shall he find a thousand troubles in his country when he arrives.
440
The Trojan Women. Euripides. Edward P. Coleridge (Translator). London. 1906.
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