London Riots and Euripides

Jocasta
      

My son Eteocles, old age is not a total misery. Experience helps. Sometimes we speak wiser than the young. [...] The worst of all; this goddess is Injustice. Often she comes to happy homes and cities, and when she leaves, she has destroyed their owners, she after whom you rave. It's better, child, to honor Equality who ties friends to friends, cities to cities, allies to allies. For equality is stable among young men. If not, the lesser force hates the greater force, and so begins the day of enmity. Equality set up men's weights and measures, gave them their numbers. And night's sightless eye equal divides with day the circling year. While neither, yielding place, resents the other. So sun and night are servants to mankind.

Yet you will not endure to hold your house in even shares with him? Where's justice then? Why do you honour so much tyrannic power and think that unjust happiness is great? It's fine to be looked up to? But it's empty. You want to have much wealth within your halls - much trouble with it? And what is "much"? It's nothing but the name. Sufficiency's enough for men of sense. Men do not really own their private goods; we simply care for things which are the gods', and when they will, they take them back again. Wealth is not steady; it is of a day.

Come, if I question you a double question, whether you wish to rule, or to save the city, will you choose to be its tyrant? But if he wins and the Argive spear beats down the Theban lance, then will you see the town of Thebes subdued and many maidens taken off as slaves, assaulted, ravished by our enemies. Truly the wealth which you now seek to have will mean but grief for Thebes; you're too ambitious. So much for you.

Your turn now, Polyneices: ignorant favours has Adrastus done you, and you have come in folly to sack your own city. Come, if you take this land - heaven forbid it - by the gods, what trophies can you set to Zeus? How start the sacrifice for your own vanquished country? And how inscribe your spoils at Inachus' stream? "Polyneices set these shields up to the gods when he had fired Thebes"? Oh, never, Son, be this, or such as this, your fame in Greece! If you are worsted and his side has best, how shall you go to Argos, leaving here thousands of corpses? Some will surely say: "Adrastus, what a wedding for your daughter! For one girl's marriage we have been destroyed."

You are pursuing evils - one of two- you will lose the Argives or fail in winning here. Both of you, drop excess. When double folly attacks one issue, this is worst of all.

-from The Phoenician Women, by Euripides, trans. Grene and Lattimore.