LP0096 -XXII ARGO- The Chariot (Part 7) of Euripides' Medea

Legendary Passages #0096 -XXII ARGO- The Chariot (Part 7) of Euripides' Medea. Previously, Medea slew both the King and Jason's bride. In this passage, she completes her revenge, and escapes to Athens on a flying chariot. http://sacred-texts.com/cla/eurip/medea.htm The Chariot (Part 7), a Legendary Passage, from Euripides' Medea, trans. by E. P. Coleridge. LEADER OF THE CHORUS This day the deity, it seems, will mass on Jason, as he well deserves, heavy load of evils. Woe is thee, daughter of Creon We pity thy sad fate, gone as thou art to Hades' halls as the price of thy marriage with Jason. MEDEA My friends, I am resolved upon the deed; at once will I slay my children and then leave this land, without delaying long enough to hand them over to some more savage hand to butcher. Needs must they die in any case; and since they must, I will slay them-I, the mother that bare them. O heart of mine, steel thyself! Why do I hesitate to do the awful deed that must be done? Come, take the sword, thou wretched hand of mine! Take it, and advance to the post whence starts thy life of sorrow! Away with cowardice! Give not one thought to thy babes, how dear they are or how thou art their mother. This one brief day forget thy children dear, and after that lament; for though thou wilt slay them yet they were thy darlings still, and I am a lady of sorrows.  (MEDEA enters the house.)  CHORUS  (chanting) O earth, O sun whose beam illumines all, look, look upon this lost woman, ere she stretch forth her murderous hand upon her sons for blood; for lo! these are scions of thy own golden seed, and the blood of gods is in danger of being shed by man. O light, from Zeus proceeding, stay her, hold her hand, forth from the house chase this fell bloody fiend by demons led. Vainly wasted were the throes thy children cost thee; vainly hast thou borne, it seems, sweet babes, O thou who hast left behind thee that passage through the blue Symplegades, that strangers justly hate. Ah! hapless one, why doth fierce anger thy soul assail? Why in its place is fell murder growing up? For grievous unto mortal men are pollutions that come of kindred blood poured on the earth, woes to suit each crime hurled from heaven on the murderer's house. FIRST SON  (within) Ah, me; what can I do? Whither fly to escape my mother's blows? SECOND SON  (within) I know not, sweet brother mine; we are lost. CHORUS  (chanting) Didst hear, didst hear the children's cry? O lady, born to sorrow, victim of an evil fate! Shall I enter the house? For the children's sake I am resolved to ward off the murder. FIRST SON  (within) Yea, by heaven I adjure you; help, your aid is needed. SECOND SON  (within) Even now the toils of the sword are closing round us. CHORUS  (chanting) O hapless mother, surely thou hast a heart of stone or steel to slay the offspring of thy womb by such a murderous doom. Of all the wives of yore I know but one who laid her hand upon her children dear, even Ino, whom the gods did madden in the day that the wife of Zeus drove her wandering from her home. But she, poor sufferer, flung herself into the sea because of the foul murder of her children, leaping o'er the wave-beat cliff, and in her death was she united to her children twain. Can there be any deed of horror left to follow this? Woe for the wooing of women fraught with disaster! What sorrows hast thou caused for men ere now!  (JASON and his attendants enter.)  JASON Ladies, stationed near this house, pray tell me is the author of these hideous deeds, Medea, still within, or hath she fled from hence? For she must hide beneath the earth or soar on wings towards heaven's vault, if she would avoid the vengeance of the royal house. Is she so sure she will escape herself unpunished from this house, when she hath slain the rulers of the land? But enough of this! I am forgetting her children. As for her, those whom she hath wronged will do the like by her; but I am come to save the children's life, lest 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. THE END http://sacred-texts.com/cla/eurip/medea.htm The play concludes with this passage. In our next passage, we hear Fables of the Argonauts and Medea's exile.