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sappers were breaching our fenced walls, and the trumpets were kindling the hostile bands to fierceness. Even if thou hadst been speaking to Bistonians face-to-face in their midst, or to the pale Geloni, on whom the sun shines not, thou wouldst have been more sparing of thy eloquence, and more observant of what is fair and just, in opening thy cause. Nor would I accuse thee of this madness: thou speakest but at command. Now, therefore, since all your words are threats, and ye demand the sceptre with warrant neither of trust nor peace, and your hands are ever on the sword-hilt, carry back in turn this message of mine, far short of thine as yet, to the Argolic prince: The fortune that is my right, the sceptre that due privilege of years hath assigned me, I hold, and will hold long. Keep thou thy royal dower, the gift of thy Inachian consort, pile up thy Danaan treasure—for why should I envy thee those nobler deeds?—rule Argos and Lerna under happy auspices! Be it mine to hold the rough pastures of Dirce, and the shores narrowed by the Euboean waves, nor think it shame to call unhappy Oedipus my sire! Let ancestral splendour be thy boast—scion of Pelops and Tantalus!—and by a nearer channel of descent unite Jove’s blood with thine.^[1] Will thy queen, accustomed to her father’s luxury, endure this simple home? rightly would my sisters perform their anxious tasks for her, my mother, unsightly from long mourning, and that accursed dotard, heard clamouring perchance from his dark seclusion, would give her offence! The people’s minds are already accustomed to my yoke; I am ashamed, alas! for the folk and elders alike, lest they should suffer so oft the uncertainty of fortune