Robert Fagles

"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."

"You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege too. I am not your slave. I serve Apollo. I don't need Creon to speak for me in public. So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption in your life, to the house you live in, those you live with— who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light! Soon, soon, you'll scream aloud—what haven won't reverberate? What rock of Cithaeron won't scream back in echo? That day you learn the truth about your marriage, the wedding-march that sang you into your halls, the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor! And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream will level you with yourself and all your children. There. Now smear us with insults—Creon, myself and every word I've said. No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you."

"When Hector heard that challenge he rejoiced and right in the no man's land along his lines he strode, gripping his spear mid-haft, staving men to a standstill while Agamemnon seated his Argives geared for combat. And Apollo lord of the silver bow and Queen Athena, for all the world like carrion birds, like vultures, slowly settled atop the broad towering oak sacred to Zeus whose battle-shield is thunder, relishing those men."