For this land's king shall in short space be here 1080
To ask if yet this sacrifice be done.
O Goddess-queen, who erst by Aulis' clefts
Didst save me from my sire's dread murderous hand,
Save me now too with these; else Loxias' words
Through thee shall be no more believed of men. 1085
But graciously come forth this barbarous land
To Athens. It beseems thee not to dwell
Here, when so blest a city may be thine.
Chorus.
(Str.)
Thou bird, who by scaurs o'er the sea-breakers leaning
Ever chantest thy song, 1090
O Halcyon, thy burden of sorrow, whose meaning
To the wise doth belong,
Who discern that for aye on thy mate thou art crying,
I lift up a dirge to thy dirges replying—
Ah, thy pinions I have not!—for Hellas sighing,
For the blithe city-throng;
For that happier Artemis[1] sighing, who dwelleth
By the Cynthian Hill,
By the feathery palm, by the shoot that swelleth
When the bay-buds fill, 1100
By the pale-green sacred olive that aided
Leto, whose travail the dear boughs shaded,
By the lake with the circling ripples braided,
- ↑ Reading ὀλβίαν instead of the stock epithet λοχίαν, "For Travail-queen Artemis." The beauty that surrounds the temple (in Delos) of the beneficent Goddess worshipped in Greece is contrasted with the cheerless home of the sanguinary deity of the Taurians.
