Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 123–177: Parodos: the Chorus and Iphigenia's libations for Orestes

Keep a holy silence, you who inhabit the double clashing rocks of the Black Sea! O daughter of Leto, Dictynna of the mountains, to your hall, to the golden walls of your temple with beautiful pillars, I, the servant of the holy key-holder, bend my holy virgin steps. For I have left the towers and walls of Hellas, famous for horses, and Europe with its forests, my father’s home. I have come. What is the news? What is troubling you? Why have you brought me, brought me to the shrine, you who are the daughter of Atreus’ son, master of a thousand ships and ten thousand soldiers, who came to the towers of Troy with a famous fleet?

Oh! My servants, how I am involved in mournful dirges, in laments unfit for the lyre, of a song that is not melodious, alas! alas! wailing for my family. Ruin has come to me; I am lamenting the life of my brother, such a vision I saw in my dreams, in the night whose darkness is now over. I am lost, lost! My father’s house is no more; alas for my vanished family, alas for the sufferings of Argos! O fate, I had one brother only and you carry him off and send him to Hades. For him, I am about to pour over the back of the earth these libations and the bowl of the dead: streams of milk from mountain cows, and offerings of wine from Bacchus, and the labor of the tawny bees; these sacrifices are soothing to the dead. Give me the golden vessel and the libation of Hades. O child of Agamemnon beneath the earth, I send these to you as one dead. Accept them; for I will not bring to your tomb my yellow hair or my tears. I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.