The prophet fell down screaming from the sky – or maybe the tree he lived in – or the high rock he sat on. We never saw.
Jerking about, waving his arms about, his prophet clothes all a mess, his eyes were rolled back when he screamed the heaven down upon us.
We had never asked for any prophet here, although we had heard about his ravings.
We weren’t the only monsters there that night. But we should have been. We had planned secretly in whispers through the wall.
No. We weren’t the only ones there. All the monsters in the universe were there that night. We could barely move, hardly breathe, by no means do the monsterly things that we had planned to do.
Some mad monster, jealous of our monstering, somehow found out, somehow managed to let everyone know without our knowing.
And then of course the lion, always ready to take advantage of a situation, got the ones we came for while we were struggling to get free of one another.
The older anax, speaking clearly, said this:
‘Its a burden not to obey,
and a burden too, if I must cleave the kid to pieces
-the pleasure to all those in the house -
and so stain the father’s hands
with streams of slaughtered maiden blood
over the altar. Is there a way without
evil? For how
can I become a ship-deserter, failing the ally’s duty?
It is right
that t<hey> should in all anger angrily demand
a sacrifice which blocks the wind – the maiden’s blood.
May it all turn out well.
“We were waiting for death. We were consuming ourselves”
“For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?”
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter3.html
