Euripides, Phoenician Women 784–832: Second choral song: the Chorus reproaches Ares and recalls the curse on Thebes

O Ares, god of much suffering! Why, why are you possessed by a love of blood and death, out of harmony with the festivals of Bromius? Not for young girls crowned in the lovely dance do you toss your curls, singing to the flute’s breath a song to charm the dancers’ feet; no, with warriors clad in armor you inspire the Argive army with a lust for Theban blood, leading your revels that are held without music. Nor do you rush with wild waving of the thyrsus, clad in fawnskin, but with chariots and horses you go to the waters of Ismenus, inspiring the Argives with hatred for the Spartans, arraying in bronze armor against these stone-built walls a band of warriors and their shields. Truly Strife is a goddess to fear, who devised these troubles for the princes of this land, for the much-suffering sons of Labdacus.

O snow-capped Cithaeron, dear to Artemis, holy vale of leaves, crowded with wild animals, would that you had never reared the one exposed to die, Oedipus, Jocasta’s child, when as a baby he was cast forth from his home, marked with a golden brooch; and would that the Sphinx, that winged maid, monster from the hills, had never come as a grief to our land with her inharmonious songs, she that once drew near our walls and snatched the sons of Cadmus away in her taloned feet to the untrodden light of heaven, sent by Hades from hell to plague the men of Thebes; once more unhappy strife is coming into bloom between the sons of Oedipus in home and city. For never can wrong be right, nor can there be good in unlawful children, their mother’s birth pangs, their father’s pollution; she came to the bed of her son. . . .

O Earth, you once bore—as I heard, I heard the story told by foreigners once in my own home—you bore a race which sprang of the teeth of a snake with blood-red crest, that fed on beasts, to be the glory and reproach of Thebes. In days gone by the sons of heaven came to the wedding of Harmonia, and the walls and towers of Thebes rose to the sound of Amphion’s lyre, in the midst between the double streams where Dirce waters the grass-green field before Ismenus; and Io, our horned ancestress, was mother of the kings of Thebes; thus our city, through an endless succession of various blessings, has set herself upon the heights, crowned with the glory of war.