Four Plays of Aeschylus

CHORUS. Alack, it is fresh in mine ears, the clamour and crash of the fray, And up to our holiest height I sped on my timorous way, Bewildered, beset by the din!

GHOST OF DARIUS. Nay—scarce a tithe of all those myriads, If man may trust the oracles of Heaven When he beholds the things already wrought, Not false with true, but true with n...

CHORUS. O King of Kings, among the blest Thou highest and thou happiest, Listen and grant our prayer, And, deeply loathing, thrust Away from us the young men’s lust, And deeply...

The surviving dramas of Aeschylus are seven in number, though he is believed to have written nearly a hundred during his life of sixty-nine years, from 525 B.C. to 456 B.C. That...

IO. Alack! what land, what folk are here? Whom see I clenched in rocky fetters drear Unto the stormy crag? for what thing done Dost thou in agony atone? Ah, tell me whither, wel...

PROMETHEUS. O Sky divine, O Winds of pinions swift, O fountain-heads of Rivers, and O thou, Illimitable laughter of the Sea! O Earth, the Mighty Mother, and thou Sun, Whose orbe...

CHORUS. Now, when it stands beside thee! for its power May, with a changing gust of milder mood, Temper the blast that bloweth wild and rude And frenzied, in this hour!

Mine ancestress, who far on Egypt’s shore A young cow’s semblance wore,— A maiden once, by Hera’s malice changed! And then on him withal, Who, as amid the flowers the grazing cr...

MESSENGER. O queen, our whole disaster thus befell, Through intervention of some fiend or fate— I know not what—that had ill will to us. From the Athenian host some Greek came o...

SEMI-CHORUS. Yea, and her child is Desire: in the train of his mother he goeth— Yea and Persuasion soft-lipped, whom none can deny or repel: Cometh Harmonia too, on whom Aphrodi...

PROMETHEUS. Child, ay—or whatsoe’er hath less of brain— Thou, deeming thou canst wring my secret out! No mangling torture, no, nor sleight of power There is, by which he shall c...