Begone then! ’twere for me a worse disgrace
To listen to a bragster’s idle prate. Exit Menelaus.
Soon a mortal strife will come.
Seek a hollow grave, and haste,
Teucer, with what speed thou may’st,
To prepare the mouldering tomb,
Where the warrior shall lie,
Deathless in men’s memory.
Lo! in good time I see his child and wife
Draw near to tend the hero’s obsequies.
Come hither, child, and take thy place beside him
And lay, in suppliant guise, thy hand in his,
And kneel as one who hath taken sanctuary,
With locks of hair as offering in thine hand—
Mine, hers, and thine—all-potent means of grace.
Then if by violence any of the host
Should drag thee from the dead man, be his lot
To perish banned, cast forth without a grave,
Cut off with kith and kindred, root and branch,
Even as I cut this lock from off my head.
Take it and keep it, child; let no man move thee.
Kneel thou, and clasp in close embrace the dead.
And ye, his comrades, stand not idly by
As women mourners; quit yourselves as men
In his defence, till I have made a grave
To bury him, though all the world forbid. Exit Teucer.
Strophe 1
When shall the score be told, the sum of the endless years?
Weary am I of camps and tramps and the hurtling of spears.
Hither and thither I roam o’er the windswept Trojan plain,
Shame and reproach for Greece, for Grecians trouble and pain.
Antistrophe 1
Would he had sunk to hell, or vanished in ether afar,
Who first admonished the Greeks to league themselves for the war—
War, the father of toils, whence mortal serrows began;
Yea, it was he who begat the plague and ruin of man.
Strophe 2
Wretch! for me no garlands fine,
Cups o’erbrimming with red wine;
No shrill flutes didst thou assign.
Wretch! a foe to all delight.
F’en the slumbers soft of night
Thy alarms have banished quite.
And my loves, ah well-a-day!
Thou hast driven them all away;
Here I lie on the cold clay:
All alone, with none to care,
While the dank dews wet my hair.
Such, accursèd Troy, thy fare!
Antistrophe 2
Erewhile Ajax, stalwart knight,
Was my buckler in the fight,
Shield against the alarm of might.
Now by Fate a victim led
To the altar, he hath bled;
And for me all joy hath fled.
O that from this barren strand
Wafted to Athena’s land
I on Sunium’s brow might stand;
Hear the waves that round it beat
Wash the wooded headland’s feet,
Sacred Athens thence to greet!
Lo I return in haste; I saw approach
Great Agamemnon, captain of the host;
’Tis plain he means to vent on us his spleen.
So, Sirrah, it is thou (for thus I learn)
Hast dared to rant and curse and threaten us,
Thus far unpunished; thou the bondmaid’s son.
Ha! had thy mother been a high-born dame,
How grand thy speech, how proud had been thy gait,
When now, a nobody, thou championest
That thing of naught, maintaining that we kings
Had no commission, or on sea or land,
To rule the Greeks or thee, and (such thy claim)
That Ajax sailed, an independent chief.
Is this not rank presumption in a slave?
And what is he whose might thou vauntest thus?
Where did he hold his ground or lead the assault
Where I was not? Have Greeks no man but him?
’Twas in an evil hour we made proclaim
Of open contest for Achilles’ arms,
If Teucer must denounce us as corrupt,
Whate’er the issue, and if ye reject
The adverse judgment of the major part,
But must for ever gird at us and rail,
Or plot to stab us, when ye lose your suit.
Never with tempers such as yours could law
Be firmly based, if we are called to oust
The rightful victors and promote the worse.
This must be stopped. ’Tis not the brawny, big,
Broad-shouldered men who prove the best at need;
The wise and prudent everywhere prevail.
The broad-ribbed ox is guided on his path
Down the straight furrow by a little goad.
A like corrective is in store for thee,
If thou acquire not some small sense full soon.
The man is dead, a shadow, and yet thou
Let’st thy tongue wag and waxest insolent.
Come to a sober mind; recall thy birth,
Bring hither someone else, a free-born man,
To plead thy cause before us in thy stead;
For when thou speak’st thy words convey no sense;
I understand not a barbarian tongue.
I would ye twain might learn sobriety;
’Tis the best counsel I can give you both.
Out on man’s gratitude! how soon it fades,
Or proves a traitor when a friend is dead!
What memory, what tittle of regard
Hath he for thee, my Ajax, thou who oft
At peril of thy life didst toil for him?
Lost labour, cast away and all forgot!
Vain, windy orator, canst not recall
The day when ye were cooped within your lines,
Scattered, half routed and as good as lost,
How single-handed he stood forth and saved you,
Though at your ships the poop decks were ablaze,
And Hector o’er the fosse came bounding, prompt
To board them? Who averted then the rout?
The very man of whom thou sayest now,
“He did no deed I have not done myself.”
Was that no loyal service? Judge yourselves;
Or once again when he in single fight
Confronted Hector, under no constraint,
But by the lot he drew—no skulking lot,7
No lump of loam, but one that well he knew
Would first leap lightly from the crested helm?
Such deeds were his, and at his side was I,
This slave, of a barbarian mother born.
How canst thou prate thus idly? Look at home.
Hast thou forgotten that thine own sire’s sire
Was Phrygian Pelops, a barbarian?
That Atreus who begat thee, wretch, did set
Before his brother a most impious feast,
His brother’s children’s flesh? That thou thyself
Com’st of a Cretan mother whom her sire
Caught with an alien slave, her paramour,
And sent to feed dumb fishes of the deep?
Thus basely born thou twit’st me with my birth!
My sire was Telamon who won the prize
As champion of the host, a peerless bride,
A princess, daughter of Laomedon,
The meed assigned him by
