Euripides, Helen 1085–1164: Fifth episode: Helen's prayer; the Chorus sings to the nightingale

Stay here; for if he does something harsh to you, this tomb and your sword would protect you. But I will go into the house, cut off my hair, exchange my white robe for a dark one, and tear my cheek with nails that make the flesh bloody. For the contest is a great one, and I see two turns of the scale: either I must die if I am detected in my plot, or else come home and save you as well. Lady Hera, you who lie in the bed of Zeus, grant relief from their labors to two pitiable creatures; we beg you, casting our arms straight towards heaven, where you have your home in an embroidery of stars. And you, who won the prize of beauty at the price of my marriage, Kypris, daughter of Dione, do not destroy me utterly. You have maltreated me enough before now, handing over my name, though not my body, to barbarians. Let me die, if you want to kill me, in my native land. Why are you so insatiable for mischief, practising arts of love, deceits, and treacherous schemes, and magic spells that bring bloodshed on families? If you were only moderate, in other ways you are by nature the sweetest of gods for men; I don’t deny it.

Let me call on you, beneath leafy haunts, sitting in your place of song, you, the most sweetly singing bird, tearful nightingale, oh, come, trilling through your tawny throat, to aid me in my lament, as I sing the piteous woes of Helen and the tearful fate of Trojan women under the Achaeans’ spears; when he sped over the surging plains with foreign oar, when he came, came bringing to Priam’s race from Lacedaemon you, Helen, his unhappy bride—Paris, fatally wedded, under the guidance of Aphrodite.

Many of the Achaeans have breathed out their last amid the spears and hurling stones and have gone to unhappy Hades; their wives have cut off their hair in sorrow, and their homes are left without a bride; an Achaean man, who had only a single ship, lit a blazing beacon on sea-girt Euboia, and destroyed many of them, casting them onto the rocks of Kaphareus and the sea-shores of the Aegean, by the treacherous flame he kindled. The mountains of Malea provided no harbor, in the gusts of the storm, when Menelaos sped far away from his country, bearing on his ships a prize of the barbarian expedition, no prize but strife with the Danaans, Hera’s holy phantom.

What is god, or what is not god, or what is in between— what mortal says he has found it by searching the farthest limit, when he sees divine affairs leaping here and there again and back, in contradictory and unexpected chances? You, Helen, are the daughter of Zeus; for a winged father begot you in Leda’s womb; and then you were proclaimed throughout Hellas, betrayer, faithless, lawless, godless. I do not know whatever certainty is among mortals, but the word of the gods I have found true.

You are fools, who try to win a reputation for virtue through war and marshalled lines of spears, senselessly putting an end to mortal troubles; for if a bloody quarrel is to decide it, strife will never leave off in the towns of men; by it they won as their lot bed-chambers of Priam’s earth, when they could have set right by discussion the strife over you, O Helen. And now they are below in Hades’ keeping, and fire has darted onto the walls like the bolt of Zeus, and you are bringing woe on woe . . . .