Parodos
[Choral]
Alas, for your cruel sufferings, my persecuted mother! woe for your life of grief! What grievous outrage
Polyxena
has some fiend sent on you, hateful, horrible? No more shall I your daughter share your bondage, hapless youth on hapless age attending.
200
For you, alas! will see me, your hapless child, torn from your arms like a calf of the hills, and sent beneath the darkness of the earth with severed throat for Hades, where with the dead
205
shall I be laid, ah me! For your unhappiness I weep with plaintive wail, mother; but for my own life, its ruin and its outrage, never a tear I shed; no, death has become to me
210
a happier lot than life.
215
