Our mistress bids me with all speed to call
Aegisthus to the strangers, that he come
And hear more clearly, as a man from man,
This newly brought report. Before her slaves,
Under set eyes of melancholy cast,
She hid her inner chuckle at the events
That have been brought to pass–too well for her,
But for this house and hearth most miserably,–
As in the tale the strangers clearly told.
He, when he hears and learns the story’s gist,
Will joy, I trow, in heart. Ah, wretched me!
How those old troubles, of all sorts made up,
Most hard to bear, in Atreus’s palace-halls
Have made my heart full heavy in my breast!
But never have I known a woe like this.
For other ills I bore full patiently,
But as for dear Orestes, my sweet charge,
Whom from his mother I received and nursed . . .
And then the shrill cries rousing me o’ nights,
And many and unprofitable toils
For me who bore them. For one needs must rear
The heedless infant like an animal,
(How can it else be?) as his humor serve
For while a child is yet in swaddling clothes,
It speaketh not, if either hunger comes,
Or passing thirst, or lower calls of need;
And children’s stomach works its own content.
And I, though I foresaw this, call to mind,
How I was cheated, washing swaddling clothes,
And nurse and laundress did the selfsame work.
I then with these my double handicrafts,
Brought up Orestes for his father dear;
And now, woe’s me! I learn that he is dead,
And go to fetch the man that mars this house;
And gladly will he hear these words of mine.
Tag Archives: Greek Tragedian
The Appointed Time – Aeschylus
Yet though a man gets many wounds in breast,
He diet not, unless the appointed time,
The limit of his life’s span, coincide;
Nor does the man who by the hearth at home
Sits still, escape the doom that Fate decrees.
Aeschylus
Justice shines in very smoky homes, and honors the righteous; but the gold-spangled mansions where the hands are unclean she leaves with eyes averted.
Aeschylus
Like a bad doctor who has fallen down sick you are cast down, and cannot find what sort of drugs would cure your ailment.