Song Of The Furies by Aeschylus

Song Of The Furies, Aeschylus was born in the year 525 BC in Eleusis, a city some 18km north west of Athens. He was the son of Euphorion who has been described as a scion of a Eupatrid (a noble family of the Attican region of Greece). As well as growing up with a burning ambition to be a writer he also distinguished himself in battle. He fought well at the battle of Marathon and others and it could be said that he actually took more pride in his military accomplishments than his dramatic writing. This suggestion is borne out by the following self-penned inscription on a monument erected in his honour in the town where he died (Gela, Sicily):

Song Of The Furies by Aeschylus

Song Of The Furies

Up and lead the dance of Fate!
Lift the song that mortals hate!
Tell what rights are ours on earth,
Over all of human birth.
Swift of foot to avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pure,
Naught our wrath to dread hath he;
Calm his cloudless days endure.
But the man that seeks to hide
Like him (1), his gore-bedewèd hands,
Witnesses to them that died,
The blood avengers at his side,
The Furies’ troop forever stands.

O’er our victim come begin!
Come, the incantation sing,
Frantic all and maddening,
To the heart a brand of fire,
The Furies’ hymn,
That which claims the senses dim,
Tuneless to the gentle lyre,
Withering the soul within.

The pride of all of human birth,
All glorious in the eye of day,
Dishonored slowly melts away,
Trod down and trampled to the earth,
Whene’er our dark-stoled troop advances,
Whene’er our feet lead on the dismal dances.

For light our footsteps are,
And perfect is our might,
Awful remembrances of guilt and crime,
Implacable to mortal prayer,
Far from the gods, unhonored, and heaven’s light,
We hold our voiceless dwellings dread,
All unapproached by living or by dead.

What mortal feels not awe,
Nor trembles at our name,
Hearing our fate-appointed power sublime,
Fixed by the eternal law.
For old our office, and our fame,
Might never yet of its due honors fail,
Though ‘neath the earth our realm in unsunned regions pale.