Parodos

The Chorus of Theban Elders enters singing. The ode is structured as a direct prayer. The elders address themselves first to Apollo at Delphi — sweet-voiced daughter of Zeus, what news do you bring? — then to Athena, then to Artemis, then back to Apollo as the lord of the death-winged arrow. They beg for the threefold aid of all three immortals to save the city from death and ruin. The form is liturgical; the panic underneath is unmistakable. They are waiting to learn what Apollo has said and they cannot yet bear the silence.

They count their losses. The earth is denying her fruits; the women are crying out in barren labor; life after life is struck down faster than a bird's flight, faster than the onrush of the Fire-God to the western shores of Night. The corpses spread infection through the streets. Wives and grey-haired mothers throng the altars, begging release. The elders ask whether Apollo has, in days gone by, lifted such a plague before, and beg him to come near again now.

They call on Dionysus too — Bacchus, god of Thebes itself — to come with his torches and drive the war-god Ares out of the land, since this is a war Ares is waging without weapons, and there is no shore he can be driven to except the open sea. The ode ends with the chorus still in supplication. They do not yet know what the oracle has answered. The plague is the only fact they have, and it is killing them. The choral form lets the audience hear the city as a single voice, before the action narrows to the one man whose body holds the plague's cause.