CHORUS Who has not cut his guildsmen yet, though seven years old; Yet up among the dead He is demagogue and head, And contrives the topmost place of the rascaldom to hold? And Cleisthenes, they say, Is among the tombs all day, Bewailing for his lover with a lamentable whine. And Callias, I’m told, Has become a sailor bold, And casts a lion’s hide o’er his members feminine.
DIONYSUS Can any of you tell Where Pluto here may dwell, For we, sirs, are two strangers who were never here before?
CHORUS O, then no further stray, Nor again enquire the way, For know that ye have journeyed to his very entrance-door.
DIONYSUS Take up the wraps, my lad.
XANTHIAS Now is not this too bad? Like “Zeus’s Corinth,” he “the wraps” keeps saying o’er and o’er.
CHORUS Now wheel your sacred dances through the glade with flowers bedight,
CHORUS
All ye who are partakers of the holy festal rite; And I will with the women and the holy maidens go Where they keep the nightly vigil, an auspicious light to show. (The departure for the Thriasian Plain.) Now haste we to the roses, And the meadows full of posies, Now haste we to the meadows In our own old way, In choral dances blending, In dances never ending, Which only for the holy The Destinies array.
CHORUS O, happy mystic chorus, The blessed sunshine o’er us On us alone is smiling, In its soft sweet light: On us who strove for ever With holy, pure endeavour, Alike by friend and stranger To guide-our steps aright.
DIONYSUS What’s the right way to knock? I wonder how The natives here are wont to knock at doors.
XANTHIAS No dawdling: taste the door. You’ve got, remember, The lion-hide and pride of Heracles.
DIONYSUS Boy! boy!
AEACUS Who’s there?
DIONYSUS I, Heracles the strong!
AEACUS O, you most shameless desperate ruffian, you!
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