Sophocles Oedipus Trilogy | Page 4

ill that moves you or a boon ye crave??My zeal in your behalf ye cannot doubt;?Ruthless indeed were I and obdurate?If such petitioners as you I spurned.
PRIEST?Yea, Oedipus, my sovereign lord and king,?Thou seest how both extremes of age besiege?Thy palace altars--fledglings hardly winged,?and greybeards bowed with years; priests, as am I?of Zeus, and these the flower of our youth.?Meanwhile, the common folk, with wreathed boughs?Crowd our two market-places, or before?Both shrines of Pallas congregate, or where?Ismenus gives his oracles by fire.?For, as thou seest thyself, our ship of State,?Sore buffeted, can no more lift her head,?Foundered beneath a weltering surge of blood.?A blight is on our harvest in the ear,?A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds,?A blight on wives in travail; and withal?Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague?Hath swooped upon our city emptying?The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm?Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.
Therefore, O King, here at thy hearth we sit,?I and these children; not as deeming thee?A new divinity, but the first of men;?First in the common accidents of life,?And first in visitations of the Gods.?Art thou not he who coming to the town?of Cadmus freed us from the tax we paid?To the fell songstress? Nor hadst thou received?Prompting from us or been by others schooled;?No, by a god inspired (so all men deem,?And testify) didst thou renew our life.?And now, O Oedipus, our peerless king,?All we thy votaries beseech thee, find?Some succor, whether by a voice from heaven?Whispered, or haply known by human wit.?Tried counselors, methinks, are aptest found [1]?To furnish for the future pregnant rede.?Upraise, O chief of men, upraise our State!?Look to thy laurels! for thy zeal of yore?Our country's savior thou art justly hailed:?O never may we thus record thy reign:--?"He raised us up only to cast us down."?Uplift us, build our city on a rock.?Thy happy star ascendant brought us luck,?O let it not decline! If thou wouldst rule?This land, as now thou reignest, better sure?To rule a peopled than a desert realm.?Nor battlements nor galleys aught avail,?If men to man and guards to guard them tail.
OEDIPUS?Ah! my poor children, known, ah, known too well,?The quest that brings you hither and your need.?Ye sicken all, well wot I, yet my pain,?How great soever yours, outtops it all.?Your sorrow touches each man severally,?Him and none other, but I grieve at once?Both for the general and myself and you.?Therefore ye rouse no sluggard from day-dreams.?Many, my children, are the tears I've wept,?And threaded many a maze of weary thought.?Thus pondering one clue of hope I caught,?And tracked it up; I have sent Menoeceus' son,?Creon, my consort's brother, to inquire?Of Pythian Phoebus at his Delphic shrine,?How I might save the State by act or word.?And now I reckon up the tale of days?Since he set forth, and marvel how he fares.?'Tis strange, this endless tarrying, passing strange.?But when he comes, then I were base indeed,?If I perform not all the god declares.
PRIEST?Thy words are well timed; even as thou speakest?That shouting tells me Creon is at hand.
OEDIPUS?O King Apollo! may his joyous looks?Be presage of the joyous news he brings!
PRIEST?As I surmise, 'tis welcome; else his head?Had scarce been crowned with berry-laden bays.
OEDIPUS?We soon shall know; he's now in earshot range.?[Enter CREON]?My royal cousin, say, Menoeceus' child,?What message hast thou brought us from the god?
CREON?Good news, for e'en intolerable ills,?Finding right issue, tend to naught but good.
OEDIPUS?How runs the oracle? thus far thy words?Give me no ground for confidence or fear.
CREON?If thou wouldst hear my message publicly,?I'll tell thee straight, or with thee pass within.
OEDIPUS?Speak before all; the burden that I bear?Is more for these my subjects than myself.
CREON?Let me report then all the god declared.?King Phoebus bids us straitly extirpate?A fell pollution that infests the land,?And no more harbor an inveterate sore.
OEDIPUS?What expiation means he? What's amiss?
CREON?Banishment, or the shedding blood for blood.?This stain of blood makes shipwreck of our state.
OEDIPUS?Whom can he mean, the miscreant thus denounced?
CREON?Before thou didst assume the helm of State,?The sovereign of this land was Laius.
OEDIPUS?I heard as much, but never saw the man.
CREON?He fell; and now the god's command is plain:?Punish his takers-off, whoe'er they be.
OEDIPUS?Where are they? Where in the wide world to find?The far, faint traces of a bygone crime?
CREON?In this land, said the god; "who seeks shall find;?Who sits with folded hands or sleeps is blind."
OEDIPUS?Was he within his palace, or afield,?Or traveling, when Laius met his fate?
CREON?Abroad; he started, so he told us, bound?For Delphi, but he never thence returned.
OEDIPUS?Came there no news, no fellow-traveler?To give some clue that might be followed up?
CREON?But one escape, who flying for dear life,?Could tell of all he saw but one thing sure.
OEDIPUS?And what was that? One clue might lead us far,?With but a spark of hope to guide our