Racine: Phaedra

48
SOPHOCLES
Antistrophe I.
Thee first, Zeus-born Athena, thee I call.
Divine and deathless One,
And next thy sister, Goddess of our land,
Our Artemis, who sits,
Queen of our market, on encircled throne
And Phoebos, the far-darter ! O
Shine on us, and deliver us from ill
ye Three,'
If e'er before, when storms of woe oppressed.
Ye stayed the fiery tide, O come and help us now
Strophe II.
Ah me, ah me, for sorrows numberless
Press on my soul
And all the host is smitten, and our thoughts
Lack weapons to resist.
For increase fails of fruits of goodly earth,
And women sink in childbirth's wailing pangs,
And one by one, as flit
The swift-winged birds through air.
So, flitting to the shore of Him who dwells
Down in the darkling West,^
Fleeter than mightiest fire,
Thou see'st them passing on.
Antistrophe II.
Yea, numberless are they who perish thus
And on the earth,
Still breeding plague, unpitied infants lie.
Cast out all ruthlessly
And wives and mothers, grey with hoary age,
Some here, some there, by every altar mourn,
With woe and sorrow crushed.
And chant their wailing plaint.
Clear thrills the sense their solemn Paean cry,
« The Three named—Athena, Artemis, "> Pluto, dwellins where the sun sinks
Phoebos—were the guardian deities of into darkness. The symbolism of the
Thebes; but the tendency to bring three West as the region of dead and evil, of
names together in one group in oaths the East as that of light and truth,
and invocations runs through Greek belongs to the earliest parables of natworship
generally. ure.