Is not of words, but for thy life itself.
_Aegis._ Why dost thou force me in? If this be right,
What need of darkness? Why not slay at once?
_Ores._ Give thou no orders, but where thou did'st slay
My father go, that thou too there may'st die.
_Aegis._ Truly the doom is fixed, this house should see
The ills that on the house of Pelops fall,
Or present, or to come.
_Ores._ Yes, those that fall
On thee: of these I am a prophet true.
_Aegis._ Thou boastest of a skill which he had not--
Thy father.
_Ores._ Still thou bandiest many words,
And length'nest out the way. Move on.
_Aegis._ Lead thou.
_Ores._ Not so, thou must go first.
_Aegis._ Dost think I'll flee?
_Ores._ Thou must not die the death thou would'st desire.
I needs must make it utter. Doom like this
Should fall on all who dare transgress the laws,
The doom of death. Then wickedness no more
Would multiply its strength.
_Chor._ O seed of Atreus, after many woes,
Thou hast come forth, thy freedom hardly won,
By this emprise made perfect!

[1] The quotations of Sophocles are (mostly) from Plumptre's
translation.

THE ELECTRA OF EURIPIDES[1]

PROLOGUE

_The Scene is in front of a Peasant's Cottage: the Centre is the door
of the Cottage, the scene on the two sides of it represents the ways to
fields and to the river. Time: early Morning, the stars still shining._

_Enter from the Cottage the Peasant on his way to his day's work_. In
the form of a Morning Prayer to the stream Inachus, he makes known the
situation of affairs, the murder of Agamemnon, etc.--and in particular
how Aegisthus, fearing lest some nobleman might marry Electra and be
her avenger, had forced her into wedlock with himself, a peasant,
honest but in the lowest poverty. But he is too good a friend to his
master's house and to the absent Orestes to wrong Electra; he has been
a husband only in name, to give her the shelter of his humble roof.
_Enter Electra from the Cottage with a watering pot_: not seeing the
Peasant she in a similar soliloquy announces that she is on her way to
the river to prosecute her unnatural toil.

_Peas._ Why will thou thus, unhappy lady, toil
For my sake bearing labours, nor desist