previous next

Chorus
And there is in legend another murderous virgin to be loathed,1 who ruined a loved one at the bidding of his foes, [615] when, lured by Minos' gift, the Cretan necklace forged of gold, she with her dog's heart despoiled Nisus of his immortal lock as he drew breath in unsuspecting sleep. [620] And Hermes2 overtook him.

1 Nisus was besieged in his town of Megara by Minos, king of Crete. Nisus' daughter Scylla, being in love with Minos, cut from the head of her father the purple hair on which his life depended, so that he was slain by the Cretans.

2 Hermes, the conductor to Hades of the souls of the dead.

Aeschylus. Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. in two volumes. 2. Libation Bearers. Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1926.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Megara (Greece) (1)
Crete (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (3 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Antigone, 1146
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: