CASSANDRA.
And yet I know too well thy country's tongue.
CHORUS.
So do our prophets, yet their words are dark.
CASSANDRA.
Ah, me! how fierce the fire, it fills my veins.
Spare me, Apollo, god of Lycia, spare.
Yon lioness that, since her royal mate
Departed, with a caitiff wolf has lain,
Will slay me, and as one that poison brews
Will in the caldron cast her jealousy,
And while she whets the knife to slay her lord
Say she takes vengeance for his lawless love.
Why do I bear on me these mockeries,
This prophet's wand, this fillet round my neck?
Go, lead the way to death; I follow soon;
Go, and adorn some other curse than me.
Behold Apollo's self is stripping me
Of my prophetic garb, and in that garb
Already has he, with unpitying eyes,
Seen me and mine the foeman's laughing-stock.
I had to bear the name of tramp, be spurned
As a poor famished beggar on the street.
And now the prophet to unprophet me
Has led me into this decoy of death,
Where for the altars of my sire, the block
Of butchery soon must my hot life-blood drink.
Yet shall we not fall unavenged of heaven.
Another minister of justice comes,
His sire's avenger on the womb that bore him.
A wanderer banished from his native land,
He shall return to put the coping stone
On murder's pile; for so the gods have sworn,
And his fall'n father's hand shall beckon him.
But why should I, forlorn, bemoan my fate,
Since I have seen Ilium, my fatherland,
Faring as it has fared, and they who dwelt
Therein so worsted in the court of heaven?
Be it accomplished, to my doom I go.
Hear me, ye gates of death, sure be the stroke,
That easily with no long agony
My blood may flow, and the last sleep be mine.
CHORUS.
O maiden, thrice unhappy, yet inspired,
If truly, as thy long address imports,
Thou dost foresee thy fate, what bids thee go
As goes a doomed steer to the sacrifice?
CASSANDRA.
Friends, there is no escaping by delay.