Creon

Only a madman makes war on the dead.

What shall I do with the dust of my grief then? Shall I bury it in my heart without name or rite of language? Or throw it to the winds that howl the desert slain?

Dare I add the few grains of my tears to the general woe?

Is justice then so pure, so unyielding? So like a diamond that dazzles as it cuts? I believed in these abstractions once, now I sit in a prison of my own devising, say prism rather, a geometry of principles that refract my crimes.

Loss holds me transparent, magnified. I die with the declining sun.

Those who the gods torture cannot die.

Say it is not so. If pain be the price of living, then what price the gods? What can I offer them now but defiance, and a death unclaimed?

Only a madman makes war on the dead. If the gods live, shall I not make war on them?

And if they are dead? Oh, then we are all madmen, making war on ourselves.

Hear me, Prometheus! I, your fellow corpse, envy you. Envy you your wound, its infection borne on swift wings to burn like a fever in every hearth. But envy you also the healing. To be torn and mend and be torn again is still to be human, still to be sane. But to be consumed endlessly without reprieve is to be flesh, nothing more. A raw vein of the ancient blood.

Ancient blood. Blinded blood that flows through these histories. The line of Oedipus, forever tainted, mingled with the earth. Shall I cry out against one who returned to the bed of his birth, when I have slept and awoken in my children's graves?

No. We are all carrion. Only some of us must wait for the pain to pick us clean.