AHASUERUS: I left Jerusalem. I began my pilgrimage through the ages. I traveled everywhere, encountered all races, beliefs, and tongues; I traveled in sunshine and in snow, among civilized peoples and barbarians, to islands and to continents; wherever mankind breathed, there breathed I. I never worked again. Work is a refuge, and I never again knew such a refuge. Every morning brought with it my daily coin . . . See? Here is the last one. Be gone with you, worthless thing! (He hurls the coin into the distance.) I did not work, only wandered, always, always, always wandering, day after day, year after year, down through all the years and all the centuries. Eternal justice knew what it was doing, for to eternity it added idleness. Each generation bequeathed me to the next. Languages that had died lay with my name embedded in their bones. With each passing age everything was forgotten; heroes vanished into myths, into a distant shade, and history slowly dissolved, retaining only two or three faint and far-off outlines. And in one way or another I saw it all. You spoke of chapters? Happy are those who read their lives in only one chapter. Those who departed at the birth of empires took with them an impression of their perpetuity; those who died when those empires were declining were buried with the hope of their restoration; but do you know what it is like to see the same thing over and over again, the same alternation of prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, endless funerals and endless hallelujahs, sunrise after sunrise, sunset after sunset?

PROMETHEUS: But you did not suffer, I believe, and it is at least something not to have suffered.

AHASUERUS: Yes, but I saw other men suffer, and, toward the end, cries of joy had much the same effect on me as the ramblings of a madman. Calamities of flesh and blood, endless conflicts; I saw everything pass before my eyes, to the point where night has made me lose my taste for day, and I can no longer distinguish flowers from weeds. To my weary retina everything looks the same.

PROMETHEUS: But nothing harmed you personally; it was I who, for time immemorial, suffered the effects of divine wrath.

AHASUERUS: You?

PROMETHEUS: I am Prometheus.

AHASUERUS: You are Prometheus?

PROMETHEUS: And what was my crime? From mud and water I made the first men, and then, out of compassion, I stole for them the fire of heaven. That was my crime. Jupiter, who reigned over Olympus at the time, condemned me to the cruelest of tortures. Come, climb up upon this rock with me.

AHASUERUS: This is a fable you are telling me. I know this Hellenistic dream.

PROMETHEUS: Old man of little faith! Come and see these chains that bind me; an excessive punishment, given that no crime was committed, but proud divinity is a terrible thing. Anyway, look, here they are . . .