[Here amid a great procession enter AGAMEMNON on a Chariot.  Behind him on another Chariot is CASSANDRA. The CHORUS approach and make obeisance.  Some of AGAMEMNON’S men have on their shields a White Horse, some a Lion.  Their arms are rich and partly barbaric.

LEADER.

All hail, O King!  Hail, Atreus’ Son! 
Sacker of Cities!  Ilion’s bane! 
With what high word shall I greet thee again,
How give thee worship, and neither outrun
The point of pleasure, nor stint too soon? 
For many will cling.  To fair seeming
The faster because they have sinned erewhile;
And a man may sigh with never a sting
Of grief in his heart, and a man may smile
With eyes unlit and a lip that strains. 
But the wise Shepherd knoweth his sheep,
   And his eyes pierce deep
The faith like water that fawns and feigns.

But I hide nothing, O King.  That day
When in quest of Helen our battle array
Hurled forth, thy name upon my heart’s scroll
Was deep in letters of discord writ;
   And the ship of thy soul,
Ill-helmed and blindly steered was it,
Pursuing ever, through men that die,
One wild heart that was fain to fly. 
   But on this new day,
From the deep of my thought and in love, I say
  “Sweet is a grief well ended;”
And in time’s flow Thou wilt learn and know
   The true from the false,
Of them that were left to guard the walls
  Of thine empty Hall unfriended.

[During the above CLYTEMNESTRA has appeared on the Palace steps, with a train of Attendants, to receive her Husband.

AGAMEMNON.

To Argos and the gods of Argolis
All hail, who share with me the glory of this
Home-coming and the vengeance I did wreak
On Priam’s City!  Yea, though none should speak,
The great gods heard our cause, and in one mood
Uprising, in the urn of bitter blood,
That men should shriek and die and towers should burn,
Cast their great vote; while over Mercy’s urn
Hope waved her empty hands and nothing fell. 
   Even now in smoke that City tells her tale;
The wrack-wind liveth, and where Ilion died
The reek of the old fatness of her pride
From hot and writhing ashes rolls afar. 
   For which let thanks, wide as our glories are,
Be uplifted; seeing the Beast of Argos hath
Round Ilion’s towers piled high his fence of wrath
And, for one woman ravished, wrecked by force
A City.  Lo, the leap of the wild Horse
in darkness when the Pleiades were dead;
A mailed multitude, a Lion unfed,
Which leapt the tower and lapt the blood of Kings!

Lo, to the Gods I make these thanksgivings. 
But for thy words:  I marked them, and I mind
Their meaning, and my voice shall be behind
Thine.  For not many men, the proverb saith,
Can love a friend whom fortune prospereth
Unenvying; and about the envious brain
Cold poison clings, and doubles all the pain
Life brings him.  His own woundings he must nurse,
And feels another’s gladness like a curse.