Goat Song - and other songs

Men of Thebes: look upon Oedipus
This is the king who solved the famous riddle
And towered up, most powerful of men.
No mortal eyes but looked on him with envy,
Yet in the end ruin swept over him.

Let every man in mankind's frailty
Consider his last day: and let none
Presume on his good fortune until he find
Life, at his death, a memory without pain.
(Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, "Exodos," trans. Fitts/Fitzgerald)

The pride not to be warred with, fought with, not to be beaten
down
of old, sounded in all men's
ears, in all hearts sounded,
has shrunk away. A man
goes in fear. High fortune,
this in man's eyes is god and more than god is this.
But, as a beam balances, so
sudden disasters wait, to strike
some in the brightness, some in gloom
of half dark in their elder time.
Desperate night holds others
(Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, 60, trans. Richard Lattimore)

In the last chapter of his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, after examining and criticising the numerous theories, political, economic and biological, by which men have sought to explain the decline of the Empire, Rostovtzeff finally turned to psychological explanation. He expressed the view that a change in people's outlook on the world 'was one of the most potent factors'; he added that further investigation of this change is 'one of the most urgent tasks in the field of ancient history' ... I have therefore judged it best to concentrate my attention on the crucial period between the accession of Marcus Aurelius and the conversion of Constantine, the period when the material decline was steepest and the ferment of new religious feelings most intense. In calling it 'an Age of Anxiety' I have in mind both its material and its moral insecurity ... When Marcus Aurelius came to the throne no bell rang to warn the world that the pax Romana was about to end and be succeeded by an age of barbarian invasions, bloody civil wars, recurrent epidemics, galloping inflation and extreme personal insecurity. For a long time the majority of individuals must have continued to think and feel as they had always thought and felt ... More surprisingly, a time-lag of the opposite kind also occurs: moral and intellectual insecurity can anticipate its material counterpart. [emphasis added]
(E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 1-4).

This was the answer Job gave to Yahweh:
I know that you are all powerful:
what you conceive, you can perform
I am the man who obscured your designs
with my empty-headed words.
I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand,
on marvels beyond me and my knowledge.
(Jerusalem Bible, Job, 42).

But even if the future gave us no cause for hope - the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time in which to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to  to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and at no other time. We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance. One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way life, why pay heed to what your neighbour says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity ... There are to be sure countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you thorugh this stream; but only at the cost of yourself; you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in this world a single path along which no one can go except you: wither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it. Who was it who said: 'a man never rises higher than when he does not know wither his path can still lead him'?
(Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, trans. R.J. Hollingdale)