Helen

1Helen Winged maidens, virgin daughters of Earth, the Sirens, may you come to my mourning with Libyan flute or pipe or lyre, tears to match my plaintive woes; grief for grief and mournful chant for chant, may Persephone send choirs of death in harmony with my lamentation, so that she may receive as thanks from me, in addition to my tears, a paean for the departed dead beneath her gloomy roof.

1Chorus Beside the deep-blue water and on the tangled grass, I happened to be drying purple robes in the sun’s golden blaze near the young reed shoots; from my mistress, from where she cried aloud her misery, I heard a sound, a mournful song not fit for the lyre, because she was then shrieking, lamenting with her wails; just as a Naiad nymph, who sends a song of woe ringing over the hills, cries out, under the rocky hollows, with screams at the rape of Pan.

2Helen Oh! Oh! Maidens of Hellas, the prey of barbarian sailors! An Achaean sailor came, he came bringing tears upon tears to me. Ilion has been destroyed and is left to the enemy’s fire through me, the death-giver, through my name, full of suffering. Leda sought death by hanging, in anguish over my disgrace. My husband, after much wandering in the sea, has died and is gone; and Castor and his brother, twin glory of their native land, have vanished, vanished, leaving the plains that shook to their galloping horses, and the schools of reed-fringed Eurotas, scene of youthful labors.

2Chorus Alas, alas! for your mournful fate and destiny, lady! You were fated, fated to have a life full of pain, when Zeus begot you on your mother, shining through the air on the wings of a snow-white swan. What evil is not yours? What life have you not endured? Your mother is dead; the twin beloved sons of Zeus do not enjoy happiness; and you do not see your fatherland, while through the cities a rumor goes, mistress, which hands you over to the bed of a barbarian; your husband has lost his life in the salty waves, and never again will you bring glee to your father’s halls and Athene of the Bronze House.

1Chorus Let me call on you, beneath leafy haunts, sitting in your place of song, you, the most sweetly singing bird, tearful nightingale, oh, come, trilling through your tawny throat, to aid me in my lament, as I sing the piteous woes of Helen and the tearful fate of Trojan women under the Achaeans’ spears; when he sped over the surging plains with foreign oar, when he came, came bringing to Priam’s race from Lacedaemon you, Helen, his unhappy bride—Paris, fatally wedded, under the guidance of Aphrodite.

1Chorus Many of the Achaeans have breathed out their last amid the spears and hurling stones and have gone to unhappy Hades; their wives have cut off their hair in sorrow, and their homes are left without a bride; an Achaean man, who had only a single ship, lit a blazing beacon on sea-girt Euboia, and destroyed many of them, casting them onto the rocks of Kaphareus and the sea-shores of the Aegean, by the treacherous flame he kindled. The mountains of Malea provided no harbor, in the gusts of the storm, when Menelaos sped far away from his country, bearing on his ships a prize of the barbarian expedition, no prize but strife with the Danaans, Hera’s holy phantom.

2Chorus What is god, or what is not god, or what is in between— what mortal says he has found it by searching the farthest limit, when he sees divine affairs leaping here and there again and back, in contradictory and unexpected chances? You, Helen, are the daughter of Zeus; for a winged father begot you in Leda’s womb; and then you were proclaimed throughout Hellas, betrayer, faithless, lawless, godless. I do not know whatever certainty is among mortals, but the word of the gods I have found true.

2Chorus You are fools, who try to win a reputation for virtue through war and marshalled lines of spears, senselessly putting an end to mortal troubles; for if a bloody quarrel is to decide it, strife will never leave off in the towns of men; by it they won as their lot bed-chambers of Priam’s earth, when they could have set right by discussion the strife over you, O Helen. And now they are below in Hades’ keeping, and fire has darted onto the walls like the bolt of Zeus, and you are bringing woe on woe....

1Chorus Once with swift foot the mountain mother of the gods rushed through the wooded glen, and the river’s streams and the deep-thundering sea wave, yearning for her lost daughter, whose name may not be spoken. The loudly rattling castanets cried out a shrill sound, when they, swift-footed as whirlwinds, followed the goddess on her chariot yoked to wild creatures, after the girl that was snatched away from the circling chorus of maidens— here Artemis with her bow, and there the grim-eyed goddess, in full armor, with her spear. But Zeus, who sees clearly from his throne in heaven, brought to pass another destiny.

1Chorus When the mother ceased from her wild wandering toil, searching for the treacherous rape of her daughter, she crossed the snow-capped heights of the nymphs of Mount Ida; and in sorrow cast herself down in the rocky woods deep in snow; and, by not making fruitful with crops the barren fields of the earth for mortals, she destroyed the human race. She would not send forth the rich nourishment of leafy tendrils for the herds, and life was leaving the cities. No sacrifice was offered to the gods, and on the altars were no cakes to burn; she made the dew-fed springs of clear water cease flowing, the avenger in sorrow for her child.

2Chorus When she made an end to banquets for gods and the race of men, Zeus spoke out, appeasing the Mother’s gloomy wrath: Go, holy Graces, go and with a loud cry take from Demeter’s angry heart her grief for the maiden; and you, Muses, with song and dance. Then Kypris, fairest of the blessed gods, first took up the rumbling voice of bronze and the drum with tight-stretched skin; and the goddess smiled, and received in her hand the deep-toned flute, pleased with its loud note.

2Chorus You made burnt offerings that were neither right nor holy, in the chambers of the gods, and you have incurred the wrath of the great mother, child, by not honoring her sacrifices. Oh! Great is the power of dappled fawn-skin robes, and green ivy that crowns a sacred thyrsos, the whirling beat of the tambourine circling in the air, hair streaming wildly for the revelry of Bromios, and the night-long festivals of the goddess.... You gloried in your beauty alone.

1Chorus O swift Phoenician ship of Sidon, dear to the surging waves, mother of the oar, leader of the lovely dancing of dolphins, when the sea is clear of breezes and Ocean’s gray-green daughter, spirit of calm, says these words: Spread your sails to the sea-breezes, as you go on your way, grasp your oars of pine, oh! sailors, sailors, speeding Helen on her way to the shore with good harbor, where once Perseus lived..

1Chorus Perhaps you may find the daughters of Leukippos beside the swell of the river or before the temple of Pallas, when at last you join in the dances or the revels of Hyakinthos in night-long joy—Hyakinthos, whom Phoebus killed with the round discus, contesting for the farthest throw—a day of the sacrifice of oxen in the Lakonian land; the son of Zeus declared that his race would be honored; and you may find the girl whom you left at home, Hermione, for as yet no torch has lit the way to her marriage.

2Chorus Oh, that we had wings to cleave the air, where the birds of Libya go in their ranks, leaving the winter rain, obedient to the piping of their veteran leader, who raises his exultant cry as he wings his way over unmoistened and crop-bearing plains of the earth. O you winged long-necked comrades of the racing clouds, go on beneath the Pleiades in their central station and Orion of the night; deliver the message, as you settle on Eurotas’ banks, that Menelaos has sacked the city of Dardanos, and will come home.

2Chorus May you come at last, speeding over your horses’ path through the sky, sons of Tyndareus, under the whirling of the radiant stars; you who dwell in heaven, Helen’s rescuers, go over the gray-green swell and the dark gray surge of sea-waves, sending the sailors favoring breezes from Zeus; and cast away from your sister her ill-fame from marriage with a barbarian, the punishment she received from the contest on Ida; but she never went to the land of Ilion, to the towers of Phoebus.