Chorus.[1]
(Str. 1)
O breeze, O breeze, over sea-ways racing,
Who onward waftest the ocean-pacing
Fleet-flying keels o'er the mere dark-swelling,
Whitherward wilt thou bear me, the sorrow-laden?
From what slave-mart shall the captive maiden
Pass into what strange master's dwelling?
To a Dorian haven?—or where, overstreaming450
Fat Phthia-land's meads, laugh loveliest-gleaming
Babe-waters from founts of Apidanus welling?
(Ant. 1)
Or, to misery borne by the oars brine-sweeping,
In the island-halls through days of weeping
Shall we dwell, where the first-born palm, ascending
From the earth, with the bay twined, glorifying
With enshrining frondage the couch where lying
Dear Lêto attained to her travail's ending,460
- ↑ This has been cited as one of the so-called inappropriate and irrelevant chorus-songs of Euripides. But why should the poet, after bringing the situation to a climax in the pathos of the daughter's farewell, in the agony of the mother's bereavement, proceed to water his wine by obvious moralizings, or by commonplaces of commiseration? When to add words of direct comment on a perfect situation would be "to gild refinèd gold," we may trust Euripides' artistic sense not to err. But that their fellow-captives, in view of what had befallen these, should be led to forecast their own fate, was (a) appropriate, for the theme had been already suggested by the words of Polyxena, ll. 359–364; (b) natural, if Homer was natural in Il. xix. 301–2.
"feeble and unnatural." It is a significant touch that Hecuba can imagine for the author of her sufferings no sterner retribution than even such sufferings:—"O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us." c.f. also ll. 941–943 of this play.
