thyestes 523

This is my first assignment off my personal list rather than the reading list (the latter gave me Demosthenes' Second Olynthiac, and I was not feeling up to that at the moment). I'll admit, this is a fairly low effort work, but I've been working on a longer piece[1] and I didn't want to blow off my translation project for two days in a row.

Seneca Minor, Thyestes 521–29

...{AT.} A genibus manum
aufer meosque potius amplexus pete.
Vos quoque, senum praesidia, tot iuuenes, meo
pendete collo. Squalidam uestem exue,
oculisque nostris parce, et ornatus cape
pares meis, laetusque fraterni imperi
capesse partem. maior haec laus est mea,
fratri paternum reddere incolumi decus:
habere regnum casus est, uirtus dare.

...[ATREUS] Remove your hand
from my knees and instead seek my embrace.
Boys, the comfort of old men, you too should
hang from my neck. Strip off your foul clothes,
spare my eyes, and take up finery equal to mine,
and happily take up your part of our
brotherly right. It is my great pleasure,
to return to a prodigal brother paternal splendor:
to have kingship is chance, to share it is virtue.

notes

A genibus manum aufer: This refers to the traditional position of the suppliant in Greek and Roman literature, in which someone who comes to beg will touch the chin or knees of the person from whom the are asking the favor. I have no idea whether this was actually a thing, or if that's even the sort of information we can know, but it's convenient shorthand that appears all over Greco-Roman poetry.

incolumi: My one and only interesting choice here was to render fratri...incolumi, "to a safe brother", as "to a prodigal brother". My justification is that (a) Atreus clearly means to imply that he feels much like the father in the parable does[2] and (b) it sounds cool.

  1. Also we had some Fun Computer Shenanigans going on, but that's a whole thing.^
  2. If you are at all familiar with the story of Atreus and Thyestes, you'll know that things are, uhhhhh...about to go off the rails.^