When the Greek mercenaries of Xenophon’s Anabasis, after months of marching and fighting in the mountains of Turkey, finally reached the Black Sea, one of them said, thankfully, “Now I can go home like Odysseus, flat on my back.
But surely they will shroud my corpse with Theban dust?
She is disturbed and disturbing.
This time let me be. Let me rage.
Yours is a grief that can’t be quenched.
Tell me, why do you love misery so much?
Hopeless frustration devoured my youth.
I’m forced to be outrageous by the outrage all around me!
How do you measure misery?
I’m so immersed in all this evil, how could I not be evil too?
Not the shape of one I loved. The ashes of a ghost.
To look on self-wrought woes, when no other has had a hand in them- this lays sharp pangs to the soul.
Women are warlike too.
If what you plan is just, why do it in the dark?
I pity him in his misery for all that he is my foe, because he is bound fast to a dread doom. I think of my own lot no less than his. For I see that we are phantoms, all we who live, or fleeting shadows.
Enter OEDIPUS, blinded, led by a boy.
Yes, if you can, but you’re in love with impossibility.
The punishment begins here – where will the end be?
Now don’t, please, be quite so single-minded, self-involved, or assume the world is wrong and you are right. Whoever thinks that he alone possesses intelligence, the gift of eloquence, he and no one else, and character too... such men, I tell you, spread them open-you will find them empty.
The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom.
PHI.: All winds are fair to him who flies from woe.