Chorus
O famous Salamis, you, I know, have your happy seat among the waves that beat your shore, eternally conspicuous in the eyes of all men. But I, miserable, have long been delayed here, still making my bed through countless months in the camp on the fields of Ida. I am worn by time and with anxious expectation still of a journey to Hades the abhorred, the unseen.
Chorus
And now a new struggle awaits me, ah, me!—a match with Ajax, hard to cure, sharing his tent with a madness of divine origin. It is he whom mighty in bold war you dispatched from you once far in the past. But now he is changed; he grazes his thoughts in isolated places and has been found a heavy sorrow for his friends. His hands’ former achievements, deeds of prowess supreme, have fallen without friends, without friends, before the unfriendly, miserable Atreidae.
Chorus
Surely his mother, companion of antiquity and grey with age, when she hears that he has been afflicted with the ruin of his mind will raise a loud cry of wailing. It is not the nightingale’s piteous lament that she, unhappy, will sing. Rather in shrill-toned odes the dirge will rise, while the hollow sound of beating hands and the shredding of grey hair will fall upon her breast.
Chorus
Yes, better hid in Hades is the man plagued by foolishness, who by the lineage from where he springs is noblest of the enduring Achaeans, yet now is constant no more in his inbred temperament, but wanders outside himself. O Telamon, unhappy father, how heavy a curse upon your son awaits your hearing, a curse which never yet has any life-portion of the heirs of Aeacus nourished but his!
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