THESEUS
That Phaedra might fall in love with him I realized only too late.
I should have forseen it, for he was very like me. (I mean, like what I
had been at his age.) But I was already growing old, and Phaedra was
still astonishingly young. She may still have loved me, but it was as a
young girl loves her father.
It
is not good, as I have learned to my cost,
that there should be such a difference of age between husband and wife.
Yet what I could not forgive her was not her passion (natural enough,
after all, though half-incestuous) but that, when she realized she could
not satisfy her desire, she sqould have accused my Hippolytus, and
imputed to him the impure longings which were consuming her. I was
a blind father, and a too trustful husband. I believed her. For once in
my life I took a woman at her word! I called down the vengeance of
the god upon my innocent son. And my prayer was heard. Men do not
realize, when they address themselves to the gods, that if their prayers
are answered it is most often for their misfortune. By a sudden, passion–
ate, mindless impulse I had killed my son. And I am still inconsolable.
That Phaedra, awakened to her guilt, should at once afterwards have
wrought justice upon herself- well and good. But now that I cannot
count even upon the friendship of Pirithous, I feel lonely; and I am old.
Oedipus, when I welcomed him at Colonus, had been driven from
Thebes, his fatherland: without eyes, dishonored and wretched as he
was, he at least had his two daughters with him, and in their constant
tenderness he found relief from his sufferings. He had failed in every
part of what he had undertaken. I have succeeded. Even the enduring
blessing which his ashes are to confer upon the country where they are
laid-even this will rest, not upon his ungrateful Thebes, but upon
Athens.
I am surprised that so little should have been said about this meeting
of our destinies at Colonus, this moment at the crossroads when our two
careers confronted each other. I take it to have been the summit and
the crown of my glory. Till then I had forced all life to do obeisance to
me, and had seen all my fellowmen bow in their turn (excepting only
Daedalus; but he was my senior by many years. Besides, even Daedalus
gave me best
in
the end.) In Oedipus alone did I recognize a nobility
equal to my own. His misfortunes could only enhance his grandeur in
my eyes. No doubt I had triumphed everywhere and always; but on a
level which, in comparison with Oedipus, seemed to me merely human
-inferior, I might say. He had held his own with the Sphinx; had stood
man upright before the riddle of life, and dared to oppose him to the
gods. How then, and why, had he accepted defeat? By putting out his
eyes, had he not even contributed to it? There was something, in this
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