21
Not so do siren melodies, or songs of swans, attract the hearers to listening, O voices of children calling upon your mother in the midst of torments!
22
With what and what manner of torments was the mother herself tortured, as her sons were undergoing the wheel and the fires!
23
But religious reasoning, having strengthened her courage in the midst of sufferings, enabled her to forego, for the time, parental love.
24
Although beholding the destruction of seven children, the noble mother, after one embrace, stripped off through faith in God.
25
For just as in a council-room, beholding in her own soul vehement counsellors, nature and parentage and love of her children, and the racking of her children,
The Brenton translation of the Septuagint is in the public domain.