πᾶσ᾽ ἀνάγκη, as O. T. 986, Her. 2. 22, Plat. Phaedop. 67 A, etc.— τά τ᾽ ὄντα καὶ μέλλοντα: for the omission of the art. with the second partic., cp. 991 n. Aegisthus means: ‘Must this house witness, not only those sorrows of our family which exist already, but those others which are to come, if I am slain?’ He speaks of his impending doom as if it were due, not to his own crimes, but to the working of the hereditary “ἀρά”, and implies that it will be followed by other deeds of bloodshed. In saying Πελοπιδῶν, he appeals, as a last hope, to family sympathies. Thyestidae, like himself, and Atreidae, like Orestes, are alike ‘children of Pelops.’ According to the legend, the calamities of the house were closed by the righteous vengeance of Orestes, whom Athena's judgment vindicated from the Furies.
This text is part of:
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary, and translation in English prose. Part VI: The Electra. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1894.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
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.