ies him shall die, although he be a friend.
This I have told you: but my attendants I tell, bring out my arms, and my
panoply which covers me, that we may go this appointed contest of the spear
with victorious justice. But to Caution, the most valued of the Goddesses,
will we address our prayers to preserve this city.

CHORUS.

O Mars, cause of infinite woe, why, I pray, art thou so possessed with
blood and death, so discordant with the revels of Bacchus? Thou dost not in
the circle of beautiful dancers in the bloom of youth, having let flow thy
hair,[29] on the breath of the flute modulate strains, in which there is a
lovely power to renew the dance. But with thy armed men, having excited the
army of Argives against Thebes with blood, thou dancest before the city in
a most inharmonious revel, thou movest not thy foot maddened by the thyrsus
clad in fawn-skins, but thy solid-hoofed steed with thy chariot and horses'
bits; and bounding at the streams of Ismenus, thou art borne rapidly in the
chariot-course, having excited against the race of those sown [by Cadmus,]
a raging host that grasp the shield, well armed, adverse to us at the walls
of stone: surely Discord is some dreadful Goddess, who devised all these
calamities against the princes of this land, the Labdacidae involved in woe.
O thou forest of heavenly foliage, most productive of beasts, thou snowy
eye of Diana, Cithaeron, never oughtest thou to have nourished him doomed to
death, the son of Jocasta, Oedipus, the babe who was cast out from his
home, marked by the golden clasps. Neither ought that winged virgin the
Sphinx, thou mountain monster, that grief to this land, to have come, with
her most inharmonious lays; who formerly approaching our walls, bore in her
four talons the descendants of Cadmus to the inaccessible light of heaven,
whom the infernal Pluto sends against the Thebans; but other ill-fated
discord among the children of Oedipus springs up in the palace and in the
city. For that which is not honorable, never can be honorable, as neither
can children the unhallowed offspring of the mother, the pollution of the
father. But she came to a kindred bed. Thou didst produce, O [Theban] land!
thou didst produce formerly (as I heard the foreign report,[30] I heard it
formerly at home), the race sprung from teeth from the fiery-crested dragon
fed on beasts, the proudest honor of Thebes. But to the nuptials of
Harmonia the Gods came of old, and by the harp and