Parodos
[Choral 1]
Hasten your step, it is time; go onward, onward, weeping! Ah me!
Electra
I am Agamemnon’s child, and Clytemnestra, hated daughter of Tyndareus, bore me; the citizens call me unhappy Electra.
115
Alas for my cruel pain and hateful life! O father, Agamemnon, you lie in Hades, by the butchery of your wife and Aegisthus.
120
[Choral]
Come, waken the same lament, take up the enjoyment of long weeping.
125
[Choral 1]
Hasten your step, it is time; go onward, onward, weeping. Ah me!
Electra
In what city and what household do you wander about, my wretched brother, leaving your pitiable sister in our ancestral home, to great pain?
130
Come to me, the unhappy one, as a deliverer from this pain, oh Zeus, Zeus, and as a defender for my father against his most hateful bloodshed; bring the wanderer to shore in Argos.
135
[Choral 2]
Take this pitcher from my head and put it down, so that I may cry aloud the night-time laments for my father. A wail, a song of death, of death, for you, father, under the earth, I speak the laments
140
Electra
in which I am always engaged, day by day, tearing my skin with my nails, and striking my cropped head with my hand, for your death.
145
[Choral]
Oh, oh, tear my face; as a clear-sounding swan beside the river’s streams calls to its dearest father, dying in the crafty snares of the
150
Electra
net, so I lament you, my unhappy father,
155
[Choral 2]
washed by the very last bath, in the most piteous bed of death. Oh, me,
Electra
your bitter cleaving by the axe, father, the bitter plans of the way from Troy! Your wife welcomed you with no victor’s garlands or crowns, but with a two-edged sword,
160
making you the mournful victim of Aigisthus, she got a treacherous bed-fellow.
165
[Choral 3]
O Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, I have come to your rustic courtyard. A milk-drinker from Mycenae has come, he has come,
Chorus
a mountain walker; he reports that the Argives are proclaiming a sacrifice for the third day from now, and that all maidens are to go to Hera’s temple.
170
Electra
My unhappy heart beats fast, friends, but not at adornment or gold; nor will I set up choruses with the maidens of Argos
175
and beat my foot in the mazes of the dance. By tears I pass the night; tears are my unhappy care day by day. See if my filthy hair,
180
and the rags of my dress, will be fit for a princess, a daughter of Agamemnon, or for Troy, once taken, which remembers my father.
185
Chorus
Mighty is the goddess; come then, and borrow from me thick-woven clothes to wear, and gold—as a favor to me—accessories to adornment. Do you think to rule over your enemies by tears, if you do not revere the gods?
190
Honoring the gods not by lamentation but by prayers, you will have good fortune, child.
195
Electra
No god attends to the voice of the ill-fated one,
or to the slaying of my father long ago. Alas for the dead, and for the living vagabond, who dwells in another land somewhere,
200
miserably wandering to a slave’s hearth, yet born of that renowned father. I myself live in a poor man’s house, wasting my life away, an exile from my father’s house,
205
on the mountain crags. But my mother, with a new husband, makes her home in a bed stained by blood.
210