Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/154

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In lawless and in wanton dalliance
Sought to a lover:—mine own shame I speak
In telling hers, yet will I utter it:—560
Aegisthus was that secret paramour.
I slew him and my mother on one altar—
Sinning, yet taking vengeance for my sire.
In that, for which thou threatenest stoning's doom,
Hear, how I rendered service to all Greece:565
If wives to this bold recklessness shall come,
To slay their husbands, and find refuge then
With sons, entrapping pity with bared breasts,
Then shall they count it nought to slay their lords,
On whatso plea may chance. By deeds of horror—570
As thy large utterance is—I annulled this law.
In righteous hate my mother did I slay,
Who, when her lord was warring far from home,
Chief of our armies, for all Hellas' sake,
Betrayed him, kept his couch not undefiled.575
When her sin found her out, she punished not
Herself, but, lest her lord should punish her,
Wreaked on my father chastisement, and slew.
By Heaven!—ill time, I grant, to name the Gods,
Defending murder,—had I justified[580
Her deeds by silence, what had the dead done?
Had not his hate's Erinnyes haunted me?
Or on the mother's side fight Goddesses,
And none on his who suffered deeper wrong?
Thou, ancient, in begetting a vile daughter,585
Didst ruin me; for, through her recklessness
Unfathered, I became a matricide.
Mark this—Odysseus' wife Telemachus
Slew not: she took no spouse while lived her lord,
But pure her couch abideth in her halls.590