Aeschylus, Agamemnon 975–1033: Third stasimon: the elders' foreboding

Why does this terror so persistently hover standing before my prophetic soul? Why does my song, unbidden and unfed, chant strains of augury? Why does assuring confidence not sit on my heart’s throne and spurn the terror like an uninterpretable dream? But Time has collected the sands of the shore upon the cables cast thereon when the shipborn army sped forth for Ilium.

Of their coming home I learn with my own eyes and need no other witness. Yet still my soul within me, self-inspired, intones the lyreless dirge of the avenging spirit, and cannot wholly win its customary confidence of hope. Not for nothing is my bosom disquieted as my heart throbs against my justly fearful breast in eddying tides that warn of some event. But I pray that my expectation may fall out false and not come to fulfilment.

Truly blooming health does not rest content within its due bounds; for disease ever presses close against it, its neighbor with a common wall. So human fortune, when holding onward in straight course strikes upon a hidden reef. And yet, if with a well-measured throw, caution heaves overboard a portion of the gathered wealth, the whole house, with woe overladen, does not founder nor engulf the hull. Truly the generous gift from Zeus, rich and derived from yearly furrows, makes an end of the plague of famine.

But a man’s blood, once it has first fallen by murder to earth in a dark tide—who by magic spell shall call it back? Even he who possessed the skill to raise from the dead—did not Zeus make an end of him as warning? And unless one fate ordained of the gods restrains another fate from winning the advantage, my heart would outstrip my tongue and pour forth its fears; but, as it is, it mutters only in the dark, distressed and hopeless ever to unravel anything in time when my soul’s aflame.