Chorus
So then you have delivered into Achaea’s hand, O Zeus, your shrine in Ilium and your fragrant altar, the offerings of burnt sacrifice with smoke of myrrh to heaven uprising, and holy Pergamos, and glens of Ida tangled with the ivy’s growth, where rills of melting snow pour down their flood, a holy sun-lit land that bounds the world and takes the god’s first rays!
Chorus
Gone are your sacrifices! gone the dancer’s cheerful shout! gone the vigils of the gods as night closed in! your images of carven gold are now no more; and Phrygia’s holy festivals, twelve times a year, at each full moon, are ended now. It is this, it is this that fills me with anxious thought whether you, lord, seated on the sky, your heavenly throne, care at all that my city is destroyed, a prey to the furious fiery blast.
Chorus
Ah! my loved husband, you are a wandering spectre; unwashed, unburied lies your corpse, while over the sea the ship sped by wings will carry me to Argos, land of steeds, where stand Cyclopian walls of stone reaching to heaven. There in the gate the children gather, and weep their piteous lamentation; they cry, they cry: Mother, alas! torn from your sight, the Achaeans bear me away from you to their dark ship to row me over the deep to sacred Salamis or to the hill on the Isthmus, that overlooks two seas, the seat that holds the gates of Pelops.
Chorus
Oh may the sacred blazing thunderbolt of the Aegean, hurled in might, smite the ship of Menelaus full in the middle, on its way in mid-sea, since he is carrying me away in bitter sorrow from the shores of Ilium to be a slave in Hellas, while the daughter of Zeus still keeps her golden mirrors, delight of maidens’ hearts. Never may he reach his home in Laconia or his father’s hearth and home, nor come to the town of Pitane or the temple of the goddess with the gates of bronze, having taken as his captive the one whose marriage brought disgrace on Hellas through its length and breadth and woful anguish on the streams of Simois!
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