Choephori.
111
(By woman's brain devised,)
The armèd chief who foemen scared,
Whom faithful lieges prized.
Dear is to me the unstained hearth, and dear
In woman's hand the unaudacious spear.
Antistrophe III.
But first of woes in every clime, 620
The Lemnian is deplored;—[1]
And still the most detested crime
As Lemnian is abhorred.
Branded with infamy by men,
The impious disappear;
For whom the righteous gods condemn,
No mortal dares revere.—
The lore which thus we chant in choral strain,
Say ye, doth Reason at her bar arraign?
Strophe IV.
Right through the lungs doth Justice' hand
Drive home the bitter steel; 630
The majesty of Zeus they dared withstand,
And to the ground, with reckless heel,
Trampled his high command.
- ↑ Herodotus, after relating how the Lemnian women had been put to death by their husbands, adds, "From this crime, and that which the women perpetrated before this, who, with the assistance of Thoas, killed their own husbands, all cruel actions are wont to be called Lemnian throughout Greece."—(vi. 138.)
