Clov: What is there to keep me here?

Hamm: The dialogue.

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

After [the Persian wars], as time passed, there arose as leaders of an unmusical lawlessness poets who, though artistic by nature, had no knowledge of what is just and lawful in the domain of the Muses. These people, frenzied as bacchantes and (KεραννύνTες) dirges with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs and imitated songs for the flute in cithara-tunes and mixed (συνάγoνTες) all the genres with one another. On account of their ignorance, these men unwittingly slandered art, saying that it does not have any standard of correctness, and that it is judged correctly by the pleasure of the auditor, regardless of whether he is a good or a bad man. Having created artistic compositions of this nature and added words that were similar in kind, these poets engendered in the populace a contempt for artistic norms and the bold conceit that they were capable of judging these things.