By Turns The Nine Delight To Sing

It Is Equally Wrong To Speed A Guest Who Does Not Want To Go, And To Keep One Back Who Is Eager. You Ought To Make Welcome The Present Guest, And Send Forth The One Who Wishes To Go.

Thus Have The Gods Spun The Thread For Wretched Mortals: That They Live In Grief While They Themselves Are Without Cares; For Two Jars Stand On The Floor Of Zeus Of The Gifts Which He Gives, One Of Evils And Another Of Blessings.

Ruin, Eldest Daughter Of Zeus, She Blinds Us All, That Fatal Madness—she With Those Delicate Feet Of Hers, Never Touching The Earth, Gliding Over The Heads Of Men To Trap Us All. She Entangles One Man, Now Another.

Clanless, Lawless, Homeless Is He Who Is In Love With Civil War, That Brutal Ferocious Thing.

For Fate Has Wove The Thread Of Life With Pain, And Twins Ev'n From The Birth Are Misery And Man!