Parodos
[Choral 1]
Ah, Electra, child of a most wretched mother, why are you always wasting away in this unsated mourning for Agamemnon, who long ago was godlessly
Chorus
ensnared in your false mother’s wiles and betrayed by her corrupt hand? May the one who
did that perish, if I may speak such a curse without breaking the gods’
laws.
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Electra
Ah, noble-hearted girls,
you have come to relieve me in my troubles. I know and feel it: it does not escape me. Still I cannot leave this task undone, nor abandon this mourning for my poor father. Ah, friends whose love responds to mine in every mood,
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allow me to rave as I am, oh, please, I beg you!
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Chorus
But never by weeping nor by prayer will you resurrect your father from the pool of Hades which receives all men.
No, by grieving without end and beyond due limits you will find cureless misery and your own ruin; in these actions there is no deliverance from evils. Tell us, why do you pursue such suffering?
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Electra
Foolish is the child who forgets a parent’s piteous death. No, closer to my heart is the
mourner who eternally wails, Itys, Itys, that bird mad
with grief, the messenger of Zeus.
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Ah, all-suffering Niobe, you I count divine, since you weep forever in your rocky tomb!
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[Choral 2]
Not to you alone of mortals, my daughter, has sorrow come,
Chorus
though you face it with less restraint than those girls inside, Chrysothemis and Iphianassa, whose parents and blood you share. They still live, as he, too, lives, sorrowing in his secluded youth,
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yet happy in that this famous realm of the Mycenaeans shall one day receive him as a
noble lord, if with the blessing of Zeus’s escort he, Orestes, returns to
this land.
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Electra
Yes, I await him with unwearied longing,
as I walk my sad path from day to day childless and unwed, bathed in tears, bearing that endless doom of evils. But he forgets all that he has suffered and learned.
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What message comes to me that is not proven false? He constantly desires to be with us, but though he desires it, he does not choose to appear.
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Chorus
Courage, my daughter, courage; Zeus in the sky
is still mighty, and he sees and rules all. Leave your oversharp anger to him; be neither excessively hostile to those you hate, nor forgetful of them, since Time is a god who brings ease.
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Neither the son of Agamemnon, who dwells by Crisa’s cattle-feeding shore nor the god who reigns beside
Acheron is unmindful of you.
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Electra
But the best part of life has passed away leaving me in hopelessness, and I have no strength left. I waste away without children and have no loving husband to champion me, but like some despised foreign slave,
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I serve in the halls of my father, wrapped in shabby garments and standing to eat scanty meals.
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