EURIPIDES
and her body is pure and fasting.
For she would willingly brifig her life to anchor
at the end of its voyage
the gloomy harbor of death.	140
strophe
Is it Pan's frenzy that possesses you
or is Hecate's madness upon you, maid?
Can it be the holy Corybantes,
or the mighty Mother who rules the mountains?
Are you wasted in suffering thus,	145
for a sin against Dictynna, Queen of hunters?
Are you perhaps unhallowed, having offered
no sacrifice to her from taken victims?
For she goes through the waters of the Lake 2
can travel on dry land beyond the sea,
the eddying salt sea.	150
antistrophe
Can it be that some other woman's love,
a secret love that bides itself from you,
has beguiled your husband
the son of Erechtheus
our sovran lord, that prince of noble birth?
Or has some sailor from the shores of Crete	155
put in at this harbor hospitable to sailors,
bearing a message for our queen,
and so because he told her some calamity
her spirit is bound in chains of grief
and she lies on her bed in sorrow?	160
epobe
Unhappy is the compound of woman's nature;
the torturing misery of helplessness,
2. Limnae, the Lake, a district in Laconia, was the center of the wor-
up of Artemis in the Peloponnese. From it she is sometimes called
imnaios, or Lady of the Lake.
186