290
Chorus
My Queen, abundant happiness is yours!
Part is before you, and the rest is promised.
Deianeira
How should I not rejoice with all my heart
when I have learned about my lord's good fortune?
My pleasure and his happiness are one.
Yet one who looks afar may even fear
for him who prospers, lest he fall thereafter.
And as for me, my friends, a strange compassion
came over me when I saw these poor women
300orphaned and homeless in a foreign land.
They too were once the daughters of free men,
perhaps; but now they lead a life of slavery.
O Zeus, god of reverses, may I never
behold thee thus advance against my offspring -
or, if thou dost, let me not live to see it!
Such is my fear on looking at these women.
Unhappy girl, come tell me who you are:
unmarried, or a mother? Your appearance
seems innocent of all these things, and noble.
310Lichas, whose daughter is this stranger here?
Who is her father, and what mother bore her?
Tell me. I pitied her most when I saw her,
for she alone knows how to feel her hardship.
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The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes. A new translation in verse by Robert Torrance. Houghton Mifflin. 1966.
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