Stasimon 6
[Episode]
Your misfortunes reach from earth to heaven.
1240
Heracles
Therefore I am resolved on death.
Theseus
Do you suppose the gods attend to your threats?
Heracles
The god has been remorseless to me; so I will be the same to the gods.
Theseus
Hush! lest your presumption add to your sufferings.
Heracles
My ship is freighted full with sorrow; there is no room to stow anything further.
1245
Theseus
What will you do? Where is your fury drifting you?
Heracles
I will die and return to that world below from which I have just come.
Theseus
Such language is fit for any common fellow.
Heracles
Ah! yours is the advice of one outside sorrow.
Theseus
Are these indeed the words of Heracles, the much-enduring?
1250
Heracles
Though never so much as this. Endurance must have a limit.
Theseus
Is this the benefactor and great friend to mortals?
Heracles
Mortals bring no help to me; no! Hera has her way.
Theseus
Never would Hellas allow you to die through sheer perversity.
Heracles
Hear me a moment, that I may enter the contest with arguments in answer to your admonitions; and I will unfold to you why life now as well as formerly has been unbearable to me. First I am the son of a man who incurred the guilt of blood, before he married my mother Alcmena,
1255
by slaying her aged father. Now when the foundation is badly laid at birth, it is necessary for the race to be cursed with woe; and Zeus, whoever this Zeus may be, begot me as an enemy to Hera; yet do not be vexed, old man;
1260
for you rather than Zeus I regard as my father. Then while I was being suckled, that bedfellow of Zeus foisted into my cradle fearsome snakes to cause my death. After I took on a cloak of youthful flesh,
1265
of all the toils I then endured what need to tell? what did I not destroy, whether lions, or triple-bodied Typhons, or giants or the battle against the hosts of four-legged Centaurs? or how when I had killed the hydra,
1270
that monster with a ring of heads with power to grow again, I passed through a herd of countless other toils besides and came to the dead to fetch to the light at the bidding of Eurystheus the three-headed hound, hell’s porter. Last, ah, woe is me! I have dared this labor,
1275
