AL CE STIS
When we could live single all our days 885
without children, it is not to be endured
to see children sicken or married love
despoiled by death.
(As before,)
Chorus
Chance comes. It is hard to wrestle against it.
There is no limit to set on your pain. 890
The weight is heavy. Yet still
bear up. You are not the first man to lose
his wife. Disaster appears, to crush
one man now, but afterward another.
Admetus
How long my sorrows, the pain for my loves 895
down under the earth.
Why did you stop me from throwing myself
in the hollow cut of the grave, there to lie
dead beside her, who was best on earth?
Then Hades would have held fast two lives, 900
not one, and the truest of all, who crossed
the lake of the dead together.
Chorus
There was a man
of my people, who lost a boy
any house would mourn for, 905
the only child. But still
he carried it well enough, though childless,
and he stricken with age
and the hair gray on him,
well on through his lifetime. 910
Admetus
O builded house, how shall I enter you?
How live, with this turn
of my fortune? How different now and then.
Then it was with Pelian pine torches, 915
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