The Suppliant Maidens
Scene: Argos. A hill rises in the foreground, and on the summit of it stand altars and statues of many gods. Enter the fifty Danaides, with their slave girls, and Danaus.
Chorus.
Zeus, the Suppliant's God, be gracious to us,
Pitifully behold us, for fugitives are we;
Where the blown sand-dunes silt the mouths of Nilus,
There we took the highway of the blue, salt sea;
There looked our last at the land of Zeus, her borders
Lapped and lost in the Syrian marches wild,
Fleeing, not as outlaws banned for blood-guilt
Lest a people perish, but self-exiled.
No way but this to escape abhorred embraces,
Marriage rites unholy that true love shuns;
Better far lands and unfamiliar faces
Than wedded and bedded with King Ægyptus' sons.
As when hard pressed on the board a cautious player
This piece or that from a threatened square withdraws,
One move seemed best unto Danaus our father,
Counsel-in-chief and leader of our cause;
One woe to suffer—and that the noblest sorrow,
Seeing we were compassed in on every hand,—
