We know Aeschylus as a tragedian and a poet, but he was also a soldier—veteran
of the battles of Marathon (against Darius I) and Salamis (against Xerxes). So
even when he wrote of mythical wars and warriors, he drew on his own
experiences and knew what he was talking about.
The characters in Aeschylus’ plays are not, on the whole, happy.
This is particularly true of the Oresteia
trilogy, focusing on the family of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, one of the leaders
in the Greek war against Troy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, everything
we know about Agamemnon (starting with Homer’s Iliad) tells us that he’s a complete shit: arrogant, boastful, bullying,
petty, inflexible and greedy. Yes, he came from an unhappy family (the House of
Atreus), and there was that curse,
but still—he really got up my nose when I was reading the classics.
Agamemnon is not the sort of guy who engages in introspection, and
his ego prevents him from ever learning. This is a serious flaw, particularly
in a head of state. And it leads to his violent murder, followed by the
destruction of his family.
The observation about wisdom emerging from pain that Aeschylus
makes in Agamemnon, the first play in
the Oresteia, was not absorbed by the
title character. Big cheeses typically don’t take instruction from poets. But
these lines were chosen by Robert F. Kennedy in April, 1968, when he announced
to the citizens of Indianapolis that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been
assassinated. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
God, whose law it is
that he who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite, against our will,
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Here’s video of Kennedy's speech that day.
He barely
outlived King by two months. We don’t learn.
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