Euripides, Orestes 316–379: First choral song; Menelaus arrives at the palace

Ah! ah! you goddesses swiftly careering on your wings, whose lot it is to hold a revel, not with Bacchic rites, in tears and groans; you black-skinned avenging spirits, that dart along the spacious air, exacting a penalty for blood, a penalty for murder, I beg you, I beg you! Allow the son of Agamemnon to forget his wild whirling frenzy. Alas for the toils which you, poor wretch, strove after to your ruin, when you heard the voice from the tripod, proclaimed by Phoebus, at his sanctuary, where the hollows are called the navel of the earth.

O Zeus! What pity, what deadly struggle is here, hurrying you on, the wretch on whom some avenging fiend is heaping tears upon tears, bringing to the house your mother’s blood, which drives you raving mad? Great prosperity is not secure among mortals. I lament, I lament! But some divine power, shaking it to and fro like the sail of a swift ship, plunges it deep in the waves of grievous affliction, violent and deadly as the waves of the sea. For what other family must I still revere, rather than the one from a divine marriage, from Tantalus.

And see, a king draws near, lord Menelaus; from his magnificence it is plain to see that he belongs to the blood of the Tantalids. All hail! you that set out with a thousand ships to Asia’s land; good fortune is your friend, for you have accomplished, with divine aid, all that you prayed for.

O my home, some joy I feel to see you again on my return from Troy, but I also grieve at the sight; for never have I seen another house more closely encircled by dire affliction. For I learned Agamemnon’s fate and the death he died at his wife’s hands, as I was trying to put in at Malea; when the sailors’ prophet, the truthful god Glaucus, Nereus’ seer, brought the news to me from the waves; he stationed himself in full view and told me this: Menelaus, your brother lies dead, plunged in a fatal bath, the last his wife will ever give him. My sailors and I wept greatly at his words. When I arrived at Nauplia, my wife already on the point of starting here, I was expecting to give a fond embrace to Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, and his mother, thinking that they were doing well, when I heard from a sailor the unholy murder of Tyndareus’ child. And now tell me, young ladies, where to find the son of Agamemnon, who dared such evil. For he was a baby in Clytemnestra’s arms when I left my home to go to Troy, so that I would not recognize him if I saw him.