Stasimon 4
[Choral]
My child! oh, foreign women! Alas for me, for your death! Your father escapes, surrendering you to Hades.
Iphigenia
Alas for me, mother! for the same
lament has fallen to both of us in our fortune. No more for me the light of day! no more these beams of the sun! Oh, oh! that snow-beat glen in Phrygia and the hills of Ida,
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where Priam once exposed a tender baby, torn from his mother’s arms to meet a deadly doom, Paris, called the child of Ida
1285
in the Phrygians’ town. Would that he never had settled Alexander, the herdsman reared among the herds, beside that water crystal-clear, where are fountains
1290
of the Nymphs and their meadow rich with blooming flowers, where hyacinths and rose-buds blow for goddesses to gather! Here one day
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came Pallas and Cypris of the subtle heart, Hera too and Hermes messenger of Zeus; Cypris, proud of the longing she causes,
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Pallas of her prowess; and Hera of her royal marriage with king Zeus; to decide a hateful strife about their beauty; but it is my death,
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maidens, bringing, it is true, glory to the Danaids, that Artemis has received as an offering, before they begin the voyage to Ilium.Reading μὰν for μὲν and ἐμὸν for ἐμοὶ, also προθύματ᾽ for πρόθυμά σ᾽ in this hopelessly corrupt passage. Monk, rejecting ὄνομα . . . Δαναίδαισιν, assigns the next two lines to the Chorus, merely altering κόραι to κόρα, but this is scarcely likely to be the solution of the difficulty.
1310
O mother, mother! he that begot me to this life of sorrow has gone and left me all alone.
Ah! woe is me! a bitter, bitter sight for me was Helen, evil Helen! to me now doomed to bleed and die, slaughtered by an impious father!
1315
I wish this Aulis had never received
in its havens here the stems of their bronze-beaked ships, the fleet which was speeding them to Troy; and would that Zeus had never breathed on the Euripus a wind to stop the expedition,Reading πομπᾷ. The whole of this passage (l. 1323-29) is probably more or less corrupt, and the construction suspiciously harsh; possibly the text has suffered from interpolations and glosses on the original. tempering, as he does,
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a different breeze to different men, so that some have joy in setting sail, and sorrow some, and others hard constraint, to make some start and others prepare and others delay!
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Full of trouble then, it seems, is the race of mortals, full of trouble indeed; and it is Fate’s decree that man should find distress.
1330
Woe! woe to you, you child of Tyndareus,
for the suffering and anguish sore, which you are causing the Danaids!
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