Parodos
[Choral]
Keep a holy silence, you who inhabit the double clashing
Chorus
rocks of the Black Sea!
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O daughter of Leto, Dictynna of the mountains, to your hall, to the golden walls of your temple with beautiful pillars,
I, the servant of the holy key-holder, bend my holy virgin steps. For I have left the towers and walls of Hellas, famous for horses, and
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Europe with its forests, my father’s home.
135
I have come. What is the news? What is troubling you? Why have you brought me, brought me to the shrine, you who are the daughter of Atreus’ son, master of a thousand ships and ten thousand soldiers,
who came to the towers of Troy with a famous fleet?
140
Iphigenia
Oh! My servants, how I am involved in mournful dirges,
in laments unfit for the lyre, of a song that is not melodious, alas! alas! wailing for my family. Ruin has come to me; I am lamenting the life of my brother,
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such a vision I saw in my dreams, in the night whose darkness is now over.
150
I am lost, lost! My father’s house is no more; alas for my vanished family,
alas for the sufferings of Argos! O fate, I had one brother only and you carry him off and send him to Hades. For him,
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I am about to pour over the back of the earth these libations and the bowl of the dead: streams of milk from mountain cows, and offerings of wine from Bacchus,
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and the labor of the tawny bees; these sacrifices are soothing to the dead.
165
(To a servant) Give me the golden vessel and the libation of Hades.
O child of Agamemnon beneath the earth, I send these to you as one dead. Accept them; for I will not bring to your tomb my yellow hair or my tears.
170
I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.
175
Chorus
I will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and
a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead,
180
Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph.
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