Electra
Hasten your step, it is time; go onward, onward, weeping! Ah me! I am Agamemnon’s child, and Clytemnestra, hated daughter of Tyndareus, bore me; the citizens call me unhappy Electra. Alas for my cruel pain and hateful life! O father, Agamemnon, you lie in Hades, by the butchery of your wife and Aegisthus.
Electra
Come, waken the same lament, take up the enjoyment of long weeping.
Electra
Hasten your step, it is time; go onward, onward, weeping. Ah me! In what city and what household do you wander about, my wretched brother, leaving your pitiable sister in our ancestral home, to great pain? Come to me, the unhappy one, as a deliverer from this pain, oh Zeus, Zeus, and as a defender for my father against his most hateful bloodshed; bring the wanderer to shore in Argos.
Electra
Take this pitcher from my head and put it down, so that I may cry aloud the night-time laments for my father. A wail, a song of death, of death, for you, father, under the earth, I speak the laments in which I am always engaged, day by day, tearing my skin with my nails, and striking my cropped head with my hand, for your death.
Electra
Oh, oh, tear my face; as a clear-sounding swan beside the river’s streams calls to its dearest father, dying in the crafty snares of the net, so I lament you, my unhappy father, washed by the very last bath, in the most piteous bed of death.
Electra
Oh, me, your bitter cleaving by the axe, father, the bitter plans of the way from Troy! Your wife welcomed you with no victor’s garlands or crowns, but with a two-edged sword, making you the mournful victim of Aigisthus, she got a treacherous bed-fellow.
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