Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 178–235: Choral dirge and Iphigenia's lament for her family

I will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead, Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph. Alas for the house of the Atreidae; the light of their scepter, alas, of the ancestral house, is lost. Once they ruled as prosperous kings in Argos, but troubles dart out from troubles: Pelops, on his horses swiftly whirling, made his cast; the sun changed from its seat the holy beam of its rays. One pain comes after another, to the house of the golden lamb. . . . from that earlier time when the Tantalids were killed, punishment came to the house, and fate presses what you do not want upon you.

From the beginning my fate was unhappy, from that first night of my mother’s marriage; from the beginning the Fates attendant on my birth directed a hard upbringing for me, wooed by Hellenes, the first-born child in the home, whom the unhappy daughter of Leda, by my father’s fault, bore as a victim and a sacrifice not joyful, she brought me up as an offering. In the horse-drawn chariot, they set me as a bride on the sands of Aulis, oh woe, a wretched bride for the son of the Nereid, alas! But now, as a stranger I live in an unfertile home on this sea that is hostile to strangers, without marriage, or children, or city, or friends, not raising hymns to Hera at Argos, nor embroidering with my shuttle, in the singing loom, the likeness of Athenian Pallas and the Titans; but . . . a bloody fate, not to be hymned by the lyre, of strangers who wail a piteous cry and weep piteous tears. And now I must forget these things, and lament my brother, killed in Argos, whom I left at the breast, still a baby, still an infant, still a young child in his mother’s arms and at her breast, the holder of the scepter in Argos, Orestes.