Ghost of Clytaemestra Sleep on! Aha! Yet what need is there of sleepers? It is due to you that I am thus dishonored among the other dead; because of those I killed the dead never cease to reproach me, and I wander in disgrace. I tell you that I am most greatly accused by them. And yet, although I have suffered cruelly in this way from my nearest kin, no divine power is angry on my behalf, slaughtered as I have been by the hands of a matricide. See these gashes in my heart, and from where they came! For the sleeping mind has clear vision, but in the daytime the fate of mortals is unforeseeable. Truly, you have lapped up many of my offerings—wineless libations, a sober appeasement; and I have sacrificed banquets in the solemn night upon a hearth of fire at an hour unshared by any god. I see all this trampled under foot. But he has escaped and is gone, like a fawn; lightly indeed, from the middle of snares, he has rushed away mocking at you. Hear me, since I plead for my life, awake to consciousness, goddesses of the underworld! For in a dream I, Clytaemestra, now invoke you.
Chorus (whine)
Ghost of Clytaemestra Whine, if you will! But the man is gone, fled far away. For he has friends that are not like mine!
Chorus (whine)
Ghost of Clytaemestra You are too drowsy and do not pity my suffering. Orestes, the murderer of me, his mother, is gone!
Chorus (moan)
Ghost of Clytaemestra You moan, you drowse—will you not get up at once? Is it your destiny to do anything other than cause harm?
Chorus (moan)
Ghost of Clytaemestra Sleep and toil, effective conspirators, have destroyed the force of the dreadful dragoness.
Chorus Catch him! Catch him! Catch him! Catch him! Look sharp!
Ghost of Clytaemestra In a dream you are hunting your prey, and are barking like a dog that never leaves off its keenness for the work. What are you doing? Get up; do not let fatigue overpower you, and do not ignore my misery because you have been softened by sleep. Sting your heart with merited reproaches; for reproach becomes a spur to the right-minded. Send after him a gust of bloody breath, shrivel him with the vapor, the fire from your guts, follow him, wither him with fresh pursuit!
Chorus Awake! Wake her up, as I wake you. Still asleep? Get up, shake off sleep, let us see if any part of this beginning is in vain.
Chorus
Oh, oh! Alas! We have suffered, friends. Indeed I have suffered much and all in vain. We have suffered very painfully, oh! an unbearable evil. The beast has escaped from our nets and is gone. Overcome by sleep, I have lost my prey.
Chorus
Oh! Child of Zeus, you have become a thief— you, a youth, have ridden down old divinities—by showing respect to your suppliant, a godless man and cruel to a parent; although you are a god, you have stolen away a man that killed his mother. What is there here that anyone shall call just?
Chorus
Reproach, coming to me in a dream, struck me like a charioteer with goad held tight, under my heart, under my vitals. I can feel the cruel, the very cruel chill of the executioner’s destroying scourge.
Chorus
They do such things, the younger gods, who rule, wholly beyond justice, a throne dripping blood, about its foot, about its head. I can see the center-stone of the earth defiled with a terrible pollution of blood.
Chorus
Although he is a prophet, he has stained his sanctuary with pollution at its hearth, at his own urging, at his own bidding; against the law of the gods, he has honored mortal things and caused the ancient allotments to decay.
Chorus
And he brings distress to me too, but he shall not win his release; even if he escapes beneath the earth, he is never set free. A suppliant, he will acquire another avenger from his family.
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