Commentary

This lament, preserved in later authors, addresses the human race as born of strife and grief, and it frames the purification poem as a call for release from the cycle of incarnation. The opening apostrophe is a characteristic element of the poem's rhetoric, which addresses an audience of mortals who must be taught the truth about their condition. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield treat the lament as a religious and ethical statement that connects the cosmology with the human predicament. Daniel Graham points out that the phrase born of strife links human suffering to the cosmic force of Strife, so that ethics and physics are joined. Richard Wright notes the poem's use of direct address and its moral urgency. Jean Bollack discusses the passage as part of the poem's religious framework. The English is approximate, and the wording of the Greek should be checked against an edition before quotation, since the surviving text is fragmentary.