Cassandra monologue — Specimens of Greek Tragedy — Aeschylus and Sophocles

Ah, me! how fierce the fire, it fills my veins. Spare me, Apollo, god of Lycia, spare. Yon lioness that, since her royal mate Departed, with a caitiff wolf has lain, Will slay me, and as one that poison brews Will in the caldron cast her jealousy, And while she whets the knife to slay her lord Say she takes vengeance for his lawless love. Why do I bear on me these mockeries, This prophet's wand, this fillet round my neck? Go, lead the way to death; I follow soon; Go, and adorn some other curse than me. Behold Apollo's self is stripping me Of my prophetic garb, and in that garb Already has he, with unpitying eyes, Seen me and mine the foeman's laughing-stock. I had to bear the name of tramp, be spurned As a poor famished beggar on the street. And now the prophet to unprophet me Has led me into this decoy of death, Where for the altars of my sire, the block Of butchery soon must my hot life-blood drink. Yet shall we not fall unavenged of heaven. Another minister of justice comes, His sire's avenger on the womb that bore him. A wanderer banished from his native land, He shall return to put the coping stone On murder's pile; for so the gods have sworn, And his fall'n father's hand shall beckon him. But why should I, forlorn, bemoan my fate, Since I have seen Ilium, my fatherland, Faring as it has fared, and they who dwelt Therein so worsted in the court of heaven? Be it accomplished, to my doom I go. Hear me, ye gates of death, sure be the stroke, That easily with no long agony My blood may flow, and the last sleep be mine.