Euripides' HECUBA Complete

Translated by E. Coleridge.

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Polyxena: Tell all, hide it no longer. Ah mother! how I dread, ay
dread the import of thy loud laments.

Hecuba: Ah my daughter! a luckless mother's child!

Polyxena: Why dost thou tell me this?

Hecuba: The Argives with one consent are eager for thy sacrifice to
the son of Peleus at his tomb.

Polyxena: Ah! mother mine! how canst thou speak of such a horror?
Yet tell me all, yes all, O mother dear!

Hecuba: 'Tis a rumour ill-boding I tell, my child; they bring me word
that sentence is passed upon thy life by the Argives' vote.

Polyxena: Alas, for thy cruel sufferings! my persecuted mother! woe
for thy life of grief! What grievous outrage some fiend hath sent
on thee, hateful, horrible! No more shall I thy daughter share thy
bondage, hapless youth on hapless age attending. For thou, alas! wilt
see thy hapless child torn from thy arms, as a calf of the hills is
torn from its mother, and sent beneath the darkness of the earth with
severed throat for Hades, where with the dead shall I be laid, ah
me! For thee I weep with plaintive wail, mother doomed to a life of
sorrow! for my own life, its ruin and its outrage, never a tear I
shed; nay, death is become to me a happier lot than life.

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