deration of] the omens of burnt sacrifices, and
Calchas speaks thus. O thou who rulest over this Grecian expedition,
Agamemnon, thou wilt not lead forth thy ships from the ports of this land,
before Diana shall receive thy daughter Iphigenia as a victim; for thou
didst vow to sacrifice to the light-bearing Goddess whatsoever the year
should bring forth most beautiful. Now your wife Clytaemnestra has brought
forth a daughter in your house, referring to me the title of the most
beautiful, whom thou must needs sacrifice. And so, by the arts of
Ulysses,[5] they drew me from my mother under pretense of being wedded to
Achilles. But I wretched coming to Aulis, being seized and raised aloft
above[6] the pyre, would have been slain by the sword; but Diana, giving to
the Greeks a stag in my stead, stole me away, and, sending me through the
clear ether,[7] she settled me in this land of the Tauri, where barbarian
Thoas rules[8] the land, o'er barbarians, [Thoas,] who guiding his foot
swift as the pinion, has arrived at this epithet [of Thoas, i.e. _the
swift_] on account of his fleetness of foot. And she places me in this
house as priestess, since which time the Goddess Diana is wont to be
pleased with such rites as these,[9] the name of which alone is fair. But,
for the rest, I am silent, fearing the Goddess. For I sacrifice even as
before was the custom in the city, whatever Grecian man comes to this land.
I crop the hair, indeed, but the slaying that may not be told is the care
of others within these shrines.[10] But the new visions which the [past]
night hath brought with it, I will tell to the sky,[11] if indeed this be
any remedy. I seemed in my sleep, removed from this land, to be dwelling in
Argos, and to slumber in my virgin chamber, but the surface of the earth
[appeared] to be shaken with a movement, and I fled, and standing without
beheld the coping[12] of the house giving way, and all the roof falling
stricken to the ground from the high supports. And one pillar alone, as it
seemed to me, was left of my ancestral house, and from its capital it
seemed to stream down yellow locks, and to receive a human voice, and I,
cherishing this man-slaying office which I hold, weeping [began] to
besprinkle it, as though about to be slain. But I thus interpret my dream.
Orestes is dead, whose rites I was beginning. For male children are the
pillars of the house, and those whom my lustral waters[13] sprinkle die.
Nor yet can I connect