Electra
Oh! to reach that rock which hangs suspended midway between earth and heaven, that fragment from Olympus, which swings on chains of gold, so that I may utter my lament
[985]
to Tantalus, my forefather, who begot the ancestors of my house. They saw infatuate ruin, the chase of winged steeds, when Pelops in four-horse chariot
[990]
drove over the sea, hurling the body of murdered Myrtilus into the ocean swell, after his race near Geraestus' strand, foam-flecked from the tossing sea.
[995]
From this came a woeful curse upon my house, brought to birth among the sheep by the son of Maia, when there appeared a baleful, baleful portent of a lamb with golden fleece,
[1000]
for Atreus, breeder of horses; from which Strife changed the course of the sun's winged chariot, fitting the westward path of the sky towards the single horse of Dawn;
[1005]
and Zeus diverted the career of the seven Pleiads into a new track and exchanged . . . death for death: both the banquet to which Thyestes gave his name, and the treacherous love of Cretan Aerope,
[1010]
in her treacherous marriage; but the crowning woe has come on me and on my father by the bitter constraints of our house.