ll have I
come, and against my will am I driven from this land. And thou, king
Apollo, God of our streets, and ye shrines, farewell, and ye my equals, and
ye altars of the Gods receiving the victims; for I know not if it is
allowed me ever again to address you. But hope does not yet slumber, in
which I have trusted with the favor of the Gods, that having slain this
man, I shall be master of this Theban land.

ETEO. Depart from out of the country; with truth indeed did your father
give you the name of Polynices by some divine foreknowledge, a name
corresponding with strife.

CHORUS.

Cadmus came from Tyre to this land, before whom the quadrupede heifer bent
with willing fall,[28] showing the accomplishment of the oracle, where the
divine word ordered him to colonize the plains of the Aonians productive of
wheat, where indeed the fair-flowing stream of the water of Dirce passes
over the verdant and deep-furrowed fields, where the * * * * mother
produced Bacchus, by her marriage with Jove, whom the wreathed ivy twining
around him instantly, while yet a babe, blest and covered with its verdant
shady branches, an event to be celebrated with Bacchic revel by the Theban
virgins and inspired women. There was the bloodstained dragon of Mars, the
savage guard, watching with far-rolling eyeballs over the flowing fountains
and grassy streams; whom Cadmus, having come for water for purification,
slew with a fragment of rock, the destroyer of the monster having thrown
his arms with blows on his blood-stained head, by the counsel of the divine
Pallas born without mother, having thrown the teeth fallen to the earth
upon the deep-furrowed plains. Whence the earth sent forth a spectacle, an
armed [host] above the extreme limits of the ground; but iron-hearted
slaughter again united them with their beloved earth; and sprinkled with
blood the ground which showed them to the serene gales of the air. And
thee, sprung of old from our ancestor Io, Epaphus, O progeny of Jove, on
thee have I called, have I called in a foreign tongue, with prayers in
foreign accent, come, come to this land (thy descendants have founded it),
where the two Goddesses Proserpine and the dear Goddess Ceres, queen of all
(since earth nurtures all things), have held their possessions, send the
fire-bearing Goddesses to defend this land: since every thing is easy to
the Gods.

ETEOCLES, CHORUS, MESSENGER.

ETEO. Go thou, and bring hither Creon son of Menoeceus, the