Euripides' HELEN Complete

Translated by E. Coleridge.

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Chorus: (singing, strophe 1)

Thee let me invoke, tearful Philomel, lurking 'neath the leafy covert
in thy place of song, most tuneful of all feathered songsters, oh!
come to aid me in my dirge, trilling through thy tawny throat, as
I sing the piteous woes of Helen, and the tearful fate of Trojan dames
made subject to Achaea's spear, on the day that there came to their
plains one who sped with foreign oar across the dashing billows, bringing
to Priam's race from Lacedaemon thee his hapless bride, Helen,-even
Paris, luckless bridegroom, by the guidance of Aphrodite.

(antistrophe 1)

And many an Achaean hath breathed his last amid the spearmen's thrusts
and hurtling hail of stones, and gone to his sad end; for these their
wives cut off their hair in sorrow, and their houses are left without
a bride; and one of the Achaeans, that had but a single ship, did
light a blazing beacon on sea-girt Euboea, and destroy full many of
them, wrecking them on the rocks of Caphareus and the shores that
front the Aegean main, by the treacherous gleam he kindled; when thou,
O Menelaus, from the very day of thy start, didst drift to harbourless
hills, far from thy country before the breath of the storm, bearing
on thy ship a prize that was no prize, but a phantom made by Hera
out of cloud for the Danai to struggle over.

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