8 Vainly, for your sakes, O sons, have I endured many pangs, and the more difficult anxieties of rearing.
9 Alas, of my children, some of you unmarried, and some who have married to no profit, I shall not see your children, nor be felicitated as a grandmother.
10 Ah, that I who had many and fair children, should be a lone widow full of sorrows!
11 Nor, should I die, shall I have a son to bury me. But with such a lament as this the holy and God-fearing mother bewailed none of them.
12 Nor did she divert any of them from death, nor grieve for them as for the dead.
13 But as one possessed with an adamantine mind, and as one bringing forth again her full number of sons to immortality, she rather with supplication exhorted them to death in behalf of religion.
14 O woman, soldier of God for religion, you, aged and a female, have conquered through endurance even a tyrant; and though but weak, have been found more powerful in deeds and words.