Agamemnon
Woe is me! my efforts are baffled; I am disappointed in my hope, anxious as I was to get my wife out of sight; foiled at every point, I form my plots and subtle schemes against my best-beloved. But I will go, in spite of all, with Calchas the priest, to inquire the goddess’s good pleasure, fraught with ill-luck as it is to me, and with trouble to Hellas. He who is wise should keep in his house a good and useful wife or none at all.
Chorus
The Hellenes’ gathered army will come in arms aboard their ships to Simois with its silver eddies, to Ilium, the plain of Troy beloved by Phoebus; where Cassandra, I am told, wildly tosses her golden tresses, wreathed with crown of green laurel, whenever the god’s resistless prophecies inspire her.
Chorus
And on the towers of Troy and round her walls shall Trojans stand, when sea-borne troops with brazen shields row in on shapely ships to the channels of the Simois, eager to take Helen, the sister of that heavenly pair whom Zeus begot, from Priam, and bear her back to Hellas by toil of Achaean shields and spears.
Chorus
The son of Atreus, encircling Pergamus, the Phrygians’ town, with murderous war around her stone-built towers, dragging Paris’s head backward to cut his throat and sacking the city from roof to base, shall be a cause of many tears to maids and Priam’s wife. And Helen, the daughter of Zeus, shall weep in bitter grief because she left her lord. Never may there appear to me or to my children’s children the prospect which the wealthy Lydian ladies and Phrygia’s brides will have as at their looms they converse: Tell me, who will pluck me away from my ruined country, tightening his grasp on lovely tresses till the tears flow? it is all through you, the offspring of the long-necked swan; if indeed it is a true report that Leda bore you to a winged bird, when Zeus transformed himself there, or whether, in the tablets of the poets, fables have carried these tales to men’s ears idly, out of season.
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