Say on, I wait full knowledge ere I judge.
O Theseus, I have suffered wrongs on wrongs.
Would’st tell the old misfortune of thy race?
No, that has grown a byword throughout Greece.
What then can be this more than mortal grief?
My case stands thus; by my own flesh and blood
I was expelled my country, and can ne’er
Thither return again, a parricide.
Why fetch thee home if thou must dwell apart?
The god has spoken; they must needs obey.
What are they threatened by the oracle?
Destruction that awaits them in this land.
What can beget ill blood ’twixt them and me?
Dear son of Aegeus, to the gods alone
Is given immunity from eld and death;
But nothing else escapes all-ruinous time.
Earth’s might decays, the might of men decays,
Honour grows cold, dishonour flourishes,
There is no constancy ’twixt friend and friend,
Or city and city; be it soon or late,
Sweet turns to bitter, hate once more to love.
If now ’tis sunshine betwixt Thebes and thee
And not a cloud, Time in his endless course
Gives birth to endless days and nights, wherein
The merest nothing shall suffice to cut
With serried spears your bonds of amity.
Then shall my slumbering and buried corpse
In its cold grave drink their warm life-blood up,
If Zeus be Zeus and Phoebus still speak true.
No more: ’tis ill to tear aside the veil
Of mysteries; let me cease as I began:
Enough if thou wilt keep thy plighted troth,
Then shalt thou ne’er complain that Oedipus
Proved an unprofitable and thankless guest,
Except the gods themselves shall play me false.
The man, my lord, has from the very first
Declared his power to offer to our land
These and like benefits.
Who could reject
The proffered amity of such a friend?
First, he can claim the hospitality
To which by mutual contract we stand pledged:
Next, coming here, a suppliant to the gods,
He pays full tribute to the State and me;
His favours therefore never will I spurn,
But grant him the full rights of citizen;
And, if it suits the stranger here to bide,
I place him in your charge, or if he please
Rather to come with me—choose, Oedipus,
Which of the two thou wilt. Thy choice is mine.
Zeus, may the blessing fall on men like these!
What dost thou then decide—to come with me?
Yea, were it lawful—but ’tis rather here—
What would’st thou here? I shall not thwart thy wish.
Here shall I vanquish those who cast me forth.
Then were thy presence here a boon indeed.
Such shall it prove, if thou fulfil’st thy pledge.
Fear not for me; I shall not play thee false.
No need to back thy promise with an oath.
An oath would be no surer than my word.
How wilt thou act then?
What is it thou fear’st?
My foes will come—
Our friends will look to that.
But if thou leave me?
Teach me not my duty.
’Tis fear constrains me.
My soul knows no fear!
Thou knowest not what threats—
I know that none
Shall hale thee hence in my despite. Such threats
Vented in anger oft, are blusterers,
An idle breath, forgot when sense returns.
And for thy foemen, though their words were brave,
Boasting to bring thee back, they are like to find
The seas between us wide and hard to sail.
Such my firm purpose, but in any case
Take heart, since Phoebus sent thee here. My name,
Though I be distant, warrants thee from harm.
Strophe 1
Thou hast come to a steed-famed land for rest,
O stranger worn with toil,
To a land of all lands the goodliest
Colonus’ glistening soil.
’Tis the haunt of the clear-voiced nightingale,
Who hid in her bower, among
The wine-dark ivy that wreathes the vale,
Trilleth her ceaseless song;
And she loves, where the clustering berries nod
O’er a sunless, windless glade,
The spot by no mortal footstep trod,
The pleasance kept for the Bacchic god,
Where he holds each night his revels wild
With the nymphs who fostered the lusty child.
Antistrophe 1
And fed each morn by the pearly dew
The starred narcissi shine,
And a wreath with the crocus’ golden hue
For the Mother and Daughter twine.
And never the sleepless fountains cease
That feed Cephisus’ stream,
But they swell earth’s bosom with quick increase,
And their wave hath a crystal gleam.
And the Muses’ choir will never disdain
To visit this heaven-favoured plain,
Nor the Cyprian queen of the golden rein.
Strophe 2
And here there grows, unpruned, untamed,
Terror to foemen’s spear,
A tree in Asian soil unnamed,
By Pelops’ Dorian isle unclaimed,
Self-nurtured year by year;
’Tis the grey-leaved olive that feeds our boys;
Nor youth nor withering age destroys
The plant that the Olive Planter tends
And the Grey-eyed Goddess herself defends.
Antistrophe 2
Yet another gift, of all gifts the most
Prized by our fatherland, we boast—
The might of the horse, the might of the sea;
Our fame, Poseidon, we owe to thee,
Son of Kronos, our king divine,
Who in these highways first didst fit
For the mouth of horses the iron bit;
Thou too hast taught us to fashion meet
For the arm of the rower the oar-blade fleet,
Swift as the Nereids’ hundred feet
As they dance along the brine.
O land extolled above all lands, ’tis now
For thee to make these glorious titles good.
Why this appeal, my daughter?
Father, lo!
Creon approaches with his company.
Fear not, it shall be so; if we are old,
This country’s vigour has no touch of age.
Burghers, my noble friends, ye take alarm
At my approach (I read it in your eyes),
Fear nothing and refrain from angry words.
I come with no ill purpose; I am old,
And know the city whither I am come,
Without a peer amongst the powers of Greece.
It was by reason of my years that I
Was chosen to persuade your guest and bring
Him back to Thebes; not the delegate
Of one man, but commissioned by the State,
Since of all Thebans I have most bewailed,
Being his kinsman, his most grievous woes.
O listen to me, luckless Oedipus,
Come home! The whole
