Ten Plays. Euripides

the victim’s kin visit their wrath on me, in vengeance for the murder foul, wrought by my children’s mother.

      LEADER OF THE CHORUS. Unhappy man, thou knowest not the full extent of thy misery, else had thou never said those words.

      JASON. How now? Can she want to kill me too?

      LEADER. Thy sons are dead; slain by their own mother’s hand.

      JASON. O God! what sayest thou? Woman, thou hast sealed my doom.

      LEADER. Thy children are no more; be sure of this.

      JASON. Where slew she them; within the palace or outside?

      LEADER. Throw wide the doors and see thy children’s murdered corpses.

      JASON. Haste, ye slaves, loose the bolts, undo the fastenings, that I may see the sight of twofold woe, my murdered sons and her, whose blood in vengeance I will shed.

      [MEDEA appears above the house, on a chariot drawn by dragons; the children’s corpses are beside her.]

      MEDEA. Why shake those doors and attempt to loose their bolts, in quest of the dead and me their murderess? From such toil desist. If thou wouldst aught with me, say on, if so thou wilt; but never shalt thou lay hand on me, so swift the steeds the sun, my father’s sire, to me doth give to save me from the hand of my foes.

      JASON. Accursed woman! by gods, by me and all mankind abhorred as never woman was, who hadst the heart to stab thy babes, thou their mother, leaving me undone and childless; this hast thou done and still dost gaze upon the sun and earth after this deed most impious. Curses on thee! now perceive what then I missed in the day I brought thee, fraught with doom, from thy home in a barbarian land to dwell in Hellas, traitress to thy sire and to the land that nurtured thee. On me the gods have hurled the curse that dogged thy steps, for thou didst slay thy brother at his hearth ere thou cam’st aboard our fair ship, Argo. Such was the outset of thy life of crime; then didst thou wed with me, and having borne me sons to glut thy passion’s lust, thou now hast slain them. Not one amongst the wives of Hellas e’er had dared this deed; yet before them all I chose thee for my wife, wedding a foe to be my doom, no woman, but a lioness fiercer than Tyrrhene Scylla in nature. But with reproaches heaped thousandfold I cannot wound thee, so brazen is thy nature. Perish, vile sorceress, murderess of thy babes! Whilst I must mourn my luckless fate, for I shall ne’er enjoy my new-found bride, nor shall I have the children, whom I bred and reared, alive to say the last farewell to me; nay, I have lost them.

      MEDEA. To this thy speech I could have made a long reply, but Father Zeus knows well all I have done for thee, and the treatment thou hast given me. Yet thou wert not ordained to scorn my love and lead a life of joy in mockery of me, nor was thy royal bride nor Creon, who gave thee a second wife, to thrust me from this land and rue it not. Wherefore, if thou wilt, call me e’en a lioness, and Scylla, whose home is in the Tyrrhene land; for I in turn have wrung thy heart, as well I might.

      JASON. Thou, too, art grieved thyself, and sharest in my sorrow.

      MEDEA. Be well assured I am; but it relieves my pain to know thou canst not mock at me.

      JASON. O my children, how vile a mother ye have found!

      MEDEA. My sons, your father’s feeble lust has been your ruin!

      JASON. ’Twas not my hand, at any rate, that slew them.

      MEDEA. No, but thy foul treatment of me, and thy new marriage.

      JASON. Didst think that marriage cause enough to murder them?

      MEDEA. Dost think a woman counts this a trifling injury?

      JASON. So she be self-restrained; but in thy eyes all is evil.

      MEDEA. Thy sons are dead and gone. That will stab thy heart.

      JASON. They live, methinks, to bring a curse upon thy head.

      MEDEA. The gods know, whoso of them began this troublous coil.

      JASON. Indeed, they know that hateful heart of thine.

      MEDEA. Thou art as hateful. I am aweary of thy bitter tongue.

      JASON. And I likewise of thine. But parting is easy.

      MEDEA. Say how; what am I to do? for I am fain as thou to go.

      JASON. Give up to me those dead, to bury and lament.

      MEDEA. No, never! I will bury them myself, bearing them to Hera’s sacred field, who watches o’er the Cape, that none of their foes may insult them by pulling down their tombs; and in this land of Sisyphus I will ordain hereafter a solemn feast and mystic rites to atone for this impious murder. Myself will now to the land of Erechtheus, to dwell with Aegeus, Pandion’s son. But thou, as well thou mayst, shalt die a caitiff’s death, thy head crushed ’neath a shattered relic of Argo, when thou hast seen the bitter ending of my marriage.

      JASON. The curse of our sons’ avenging spirit and of justice, that calls for blood, be on thee!

      MEDEA. What god or power divine hears thee, breaker of oaths and every law of hospitality?

      JASON. Fie upon thee! cursed witch! child-murderess!

      MEDEA. To thy house! go, bury thy wife.

      JASON. I go, bereft of both my sons.

      MEDEA. Thy grief is yet to come; wait till old age is with thee too.

      JASON. O my dear, dear children!

      MEDEA. Dear to their mother, not to thee.

      JASON. And yet thou didst slay them?

      MEDEA. Yea, to vex thy heart.

      JASON. One last fond kiss, ah me! I fain would on their lips imprint.

      MEDEA. Embraces now, and fond farewells for them; but then a cold repulse!

      JASON. By heaven I do adjure thee, let me touch their tender skin.

      MEDEA. No, no! in vain this word has sped its flight.

      JASON. O Zeus, dost hear how I am driven hence; dost mark the treatment I receive from this she-lion, fell murderess of her young? Yet so far as I may and can, I raise for them a dirge, and do adjure the gods to witness how thou hast slain my sons, and wilt not suffer me to embrace or bury their dead bodies. Would I had never begotten them to see thee slay them after all!

      [The chariot carries MEDEA away.]

      CHORUS. [chanting.] Many a fate doth Zeus dispense, high on his Olympian throne; oft do the gods bring things to pass beyond man’s expectation; that, which we thought would be, is not fulfilled, while for the unlooked-for god finds out a way; and such hath been the issue of this matter.