Upsoaring wings: Drop by drop upon the heart

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.