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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.
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Chorus
I will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and
a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead,
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Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph.
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Alas for the house of the Atreidae; the light of their scepter, alas, of the ancestral house, is lost. Once they ruled
as prosperous kings in Argos, but troubles dart out from troubles: Pelops, on his horses swiftly whirling, made his cast; the sun changed from its seat the holy beam of its rays.
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One pain comes after another, to the house of the golden lamb. . . . from that earlier time when the Tantalids were killed,
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punishment came to the house, and fate presses what you do not want upon you.
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Iphigenia
From the beginning my fate was unhappy, from that first night of my mather’s marriage;
from the beginning the Fates attendant on my birth directed a hard upbringing for me, wooed by Hellenes, the first-born child in the home,
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whom the unhappy daughter of Leda, by my father’s fault, bore as a victim and a sacrifice not joyful, she brought me up as an offering. In the horse-drawn chariot,
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they set me as a bride on the sands of Aulis, oh woe, a wretched bride for the son of the Nereid, alas! But now, as a stranger I live in an unfertile home on this sea that is hostile to strangers,
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without marriage, or children, or city, or friends, not raising hymns to Hera at Argos, nor embroidering with my shuttle, in the singing loom, the likeness of Athenian Pallas and the Titans; but
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. . . a bloody fate, not to be hymned by the lyre, of strangers who wail a piteous cry and weep piteous tears. And now I must forget these things,
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and lament my brother, killed in Argos, whom I left at the breast, still a baby, still an infant, still a young child in his mother’s arms and at her breast,
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the holder of the scepter in Argos, Orestes.
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