Robert Fagles > Quotes

“The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of the 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.”
― Robert Fagles

“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.”
― Robert Fagles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex / Oedipus at Colonus / Antigone

“Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,
and the destiny that weighs me down, your widow,
now so soon? Yes, soon they will kill you off,
all the Achaean forces massed for assault, and then
bereft of you, better for me to sink beneath the earth.
What other warmth, what comfort's left for me,
once you have met your doom? Nothing but torment!”
― Robert Fagles, The Iliad

“Homer was thus at once contemporary in content and antique in form." - Bernard Knox”
― Robert Fagles, The Odyssey

“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.”
― Robert Fagles, The Iliad

“The god of war is impartial: he hands out death to the man who hands out death.”
― Robert Fagles, The Iliad

“Suspicious we are, we men who walk the earth.”
― Robert Fagles, The Odyssey

“The meter itself demands a special vocabulary, for many combinations of long and short syllables that are common in the spoken language cannot be admitted to the line —any word with three consecutive short syllables, for example, any word with one short syllable between two longs. This difficulty was met by choosing freely among the many variations of pronunciation and prosody afforded by Greek dialectal differences; the epic language is a mixture of dialects." - Bernard Knox”
― Robert Fagles, The Odyssey