CHORUS
A
lonelydweller in a
lonely home art thou.
PELEUS
I have no city any longer; there! on the ground my sceptre do
cast; and thou, daughter of Nereus, 'neath thy dim
grotto, shalt see
me grovelling in the dust, a ruined king.
CHORUS
Look, look! (A dim form of
divine appearance is seen hovering
mid air.) What is that moving? what influence
divine am I conscious
of? Look, maidens, mark it well; see, yonder is some deity, wafted
through the lustrous air and alighting on the plains of Phthia, home
of steeds.
THETIS (from above)
O Peleus! because of my
wedded days with thee now long agone, I
Thetis am come from the halls of Nereus. And first I
counsel thee
not to
grieve to
excess in thy present
distress, for I too who need
ne'er have borne children to my sorrow, have lost the child of our
love, Achilles swift of foot,
foremost of the sons of Hellas. Next
will I declare why I am come, and do thou give ear. Carry yonder
corpse, Achilles' son, to the Pythian altar and there bury it, a
reproach to Delphi, that his tomb may
proclaim the
violent death he
met at the hand of Orestes. And for his
captive wife Andromache,-she
must dwell in the Molossian land, united in
honourable wedlock with
Helenus, and with her this babe, the sole
survivor as he is of all the
line of Aeacus, for from him a
succession of
prosperous kings of
Molossia is to go on
unbroken; for the race that springs from thee and
me, my aged lord, must not thus be brought to
naught; no! nor Troy's
line either; for her fate too is cared for by the gods,
albeit her
fall was due to the eager wish of Pallas. Thee too, that thou mayst
know the saving grace of
wedding me, will I, a
goddess born and
daughter of a god,
release from all the ills that flesh is heir to and
make a deity to know not death nor decay. From
henceforth in the halls
of Nereus shalt thou dwell with me, god and
goddess together;
thenceshalt thou rise dry-shod from out the main and see Achilles, our
dear son, settled in his island-home by the strand of Leuce, that is
girdled by the Euxine sea. But get thee to Delphi's god-built town,
carrying this
corpse with thee, and, after thou hast buried him,
return and settle in the cave which time hath hollowed in the Sepian
rock and there abide, till from the sea I come with choir of fifty
Nereids to be thy
escortthence; for fate's
decree thou must fulfil;
such is the pleasure of Zeus. Cease then to mourn the dead; this is
the lot which heaven assigns to all, and all must pay their debt to
death.
PELEUS
Great queen, my honoured wife, from Nereus
sprung, all hail!
thou art
actingherein as befits thyself and thy children. So I will
stay my grief at thy bidding,
goddess, and, when I have buried the
dead, will seek the glens of Pelion, even the place where I took thy
beauteous form to my
embrace. Surely after this every
prudent man will
seek to marry a wife of noble stock and give his daughter to a husband
good and true, never
setting his heart on a
worthless woman, not
even though she bring a
sumptuous dowry to his house. So would men
ne'er suffer ill at heaven's hand.
(THETIS vanishes.)
CHORUS (chanting)
Many are the shapes of Heaven's denizens, and many a thing they
bring to pass
contrary to our
expectation; that which we thought would
be is not
accomplished, while for the
unexpected God finds out a
way. E'en such hath been the issue of this matter.
-THE END-
.