View:
By Card
Chorus
Let me call on you, beneath leafy haunts, sitting in your place of song, you, the most sweetly singing bird,
tearful nightingale, oh, come, trilling through your tawny throat, to aid me in my lament, as I sing the piteous woes of Helen and
1110
the tearful fate of Trojan women under the Achaeans’ spears; when he sped over the surging plains with foreign oar, when he came, came bringing to Priam’s race from
Lacedaemon
1115
you, Helen, his unhappy bride—
Paris
, fatally wedded, under the guidance of Aphrodite.
1120
Let me call on you, beneath leafy haunts, sitting in your place of song, you, the most sweetly singing bird,
tearful nightingale, oh, come, trilling through your tawny throat, to aid me in my lament, as I sing the piteous woes of Helen and
1110
the tearful fate of Trojan women under the Achaeans’ spears; when he sped over the surging plains with foreign oar, when he came, came bringing to Priam’s race from
Lacedaemon
1115
you, Helen, his unhappy bride—
Paris
, fatally wedded, under the guidance of Aphrodite.
1120
Chorus
Many of the Achaeans have breathed out their last amid the spears and hurling stones and have gone to unhappy Hades; their wives have cut off their hair in sorrow,
and their homes are left without a bride; an Achaean man, who had only a single ship, lit a blazing beacon on sea-girt
Euboia
, and destroyed many of them, casting them onto the rocks of Kaphareus
1125
and the sea-shores of the
Aegean
, by the treacherous flame he kindled. The mountains of Malea provided no harbor, in the gusts of the storm, when Menelaos sped far away from his country, bearing on his ships a prize of the barbarian expedition, no prize but strife
1130
with the Danaans, Hera’s holy phantom.
1135
Many of the Achaeans have breathed out their last amid the spears and hurling stones and have gone to unhappy Hades; their wives have cut off their hair in sorrow,
and their homes are left without a bride; an Achaean man, who had only a single ship, lit a blazing beacon on sea-girt
Euboia
, and destroyed many of them, casting them onto the rocks of Kaphareus
1125
and the sea-shores of the
Aegean
, by the treacherous flame he kindled. The mountains of Malea provided no harbor, in the gusts of the storm, when Menelaos sped far away from his country, bearing on his ships a prize of the barbarian expedition, no prize but strife
1130
with the Danaans, Hera’s holy phantom.
1135
Chorus
What is god, or what is not god, or what is in between— what mortal says he has found it by searching the farthest limit,
when he sees divine affairs leaping here and there again and back, in contradictory and unexpected chances? You, Helen, are the daughter of Zeus;
1140
for a winged father begot you in
Leda
’s womb; and then you were proclaimed throughout
Hellas
, betrayer, faithless, lawless, godless. I do not know whatever certainty is among mortals,
1145
but the word of the gods I have found true.
1150
What is god, or what is not god, or what is in between— what mortal says he has found it by searching the farthest limit,
when he sees divine affairs leaping here and there again and back, in contradictory and unexpected chances? You, Helen, are the daughter of Zeus;
1140
for a winged father begot you in
Leda
’s womb; and then you were proclaimed throughout
Hellas
, betrayer, faithless, lawless, godless. I do not know whatever certainty is among mortals,
1145
but the word of the gods I have found true.
1150
Chorus
You are fools, who try to win a reputation for virtue through war and marshalled lines of spears, senselessly putting an end to mortal troubles;
for if a bloody quarrel is to decide it, strife will never leave off in the towns of men; by it they won as their lot bed-chambers of Priam’s earth, when they could have set right by discussion
1155
the strife over you, O Helen. And now they are below in Hades’ keeping, and fire has darted onto the walls like the bolt of Zeus, and you are bringing woe on woe . . . .
1160
You are fools, who try to win a reputation for virtue through war and marshalled lines of spears, senselessly putting an end to mortal troubles;
for if a bloody quarrel is to decide it, strife will never leave off in the towns of men; by it they won as their lot bed-chambers of Priam’s earth, when they could have set right by discussion
1155
the strife over you, O Helen. And now they are below in Hades’ keeping, and fire has darted onto the walls like the bolt of Zeus, and you are bringing woe on woe . . . .
1160
Helen. Euripides. Edward P. Coleridge (Translator). London. 1906.
Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.
Funding provided by The Annenberg CPB/Project.