"The hunter catches a dreadful prey, the seaman steers his ship into an unspeakable harbor, the plowman sows and reaps a fearful harvest, the investigator finds the criminal and the judge convicts him—they are all the same man—the revealer turns into the thing revealed, the finder into the thing found, the calculator finds he is himself the solution of the equation and the physician discovers that he is the disease. The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance—he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting."
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Academics from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesTranslators from the United StatesPrinceton University facultyMembers of the American Philosophical Society
Original Language: English
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Sources
Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays (New York: Viking, 1982) Introduction to 'Oedipus the King', p. 125. Explicating Aristotle's concept of ' ('reversal')
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Fagles
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Robert Fagles
Robert Fagles (September 11, 1933 – March 26, 2008) was an American translator, poet, and academic. He was best known for his many translations of ancient Greek and Roman classics, especially his acclaimed translations of the epic poems of Homer and Virgil. He taught English and comparative literature for many years at Princeton University.
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