Stasimon 2
Phaedra
Do thou at least advise me well.
For this very day shall I gladden Cypris, my destroyer, by yielding up my life, and shall own myself vanquished by cruel love. Yet shall my dying be another’s curse, that he may learn not to exult at my misfortunes;
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but when he comes to share the self-same plague with me, he will take a lesson in wisdom.
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[Choral 1]
O to be nestling ’neath some pathless cavern, there by god’s creating hand to grow into a bird amid the winged tribes!
Chorus
Away would I soar to Adrians wave-beat shore and to the waters of Eridanus; where a father’s hapless daughtersThe daughters of Helios and Clymene are represented as weeping for Phaethon their brother on the banks of Eridanus (Po). Ovid Metam. v. 340 sqq. says the sun turned their tears into amber, and they themselves became poplars on the river-bank. in their grief for Phaethon
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distil into the glooming flood the amber brilliance of their tears.
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And to the apple-bearing strand of those minstrels in the west I then would come, where ocean’s lord
no more to sailors grants a passage o’er the deep dark main, finding there the heaven’s holy bound, upheld by Atlas, where water from ambrosial founts wells up beside the couch of Zeus inside his halls,
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and holy earth, the bounteous mother, causes joy to spring in heavenly breasts.
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[Choral 2]
O white-winged bark, that o’er the booming ocean-wave didst bring
Chorus
my royal mistress from her happy home, to crown her queen ’mongst sorrow’s brides! Surely evil omens from either port, at least from Crete, were with that ship, what time to glorious Athens it sped its way,
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and the crew made fast its twisted cable-ends upon the beach of
Munychus, and on the land stept out.
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Whence comes it that her heart
is crushed, cruelly afflicted by Aphrodite with unholy love; so she by bitter grief o’erwhelmed will tie a noose within her bridal bower to fit it to her fair white neck,
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too modest for this hateful lot in life, prizing o’er all her name and fame, and striving thus to rid her soul of passion’s sting.
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