A Winter of Aeschylus
By: John Byron Kuhner
Tags: Aeschylus, Tragedy, Classics, Drama, From The Editor

A Winter of Aeschylus

In Medias Res Takes A Look At The Grandest of the Tragedians This Season

Philippe-Auguste Hennequin’s “Remorse of Orestes” (1800), in the Louvre. (source)

It’s curious the things you remember from college, decades later. I remember, during the first class of a course on Plato’s Republic, that the professor praised the Republic as one of the most famous and worthy works of the ancient world. “It is one of the greatest works of the mind of antiquity,” he opined, in his precise, German-accented English. “But it is not the greatest. Does anyone know what that is, by the way? The greatest work of the mind of antiquity?”

We looked at each other in stunned silence. Was he really asking us to make a pronouncement rather than dissect and subvert other people’s pronouncements? This was going against all of our training, and unsurprisingly we had no answer for him.

He stared somewhat disappointed at our silent, blank faces. “Well, it’s Aeschylus’s Oresteia,” he said finally. “That’s the greatest work of the mind of antiquity. But the Republic is up there,” he said, and he returned to the matter at hand, launching into his introductory lecture about when the Republic was written and the rest of it.

But I was smitten. Good wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the best. “Someday,” I thought, “I’ve got to read Aeschylus.”

Over the next few months, that’s what we invite you to do: read Aeschylus. There are only seven extant plays, making Aeschylus one of those few great authors whose complete works you really can read. We’ve got our crack team of essayists to accompany you on your journey (and there’s room for more essays if you want to publish with us; we expect to publish about Aeschylus through fall and well into winter; pitch us at inmediasres@paideia-institute.org). As each essay appears (the first will be published in November), it will be gathered in the links down below.

Why bother with Aeschylus? He’s not an immediately appealing sort: no sex, no page-turning plots, no love stories, no fantasy adventures to distant lands. In 2020 the news has been compelling and important almost every day; why divert your attention to a 5th century B.C. writer who wrote about a bunch of made-up heroes and heroines like Agamemnon and Prometheus and Clytemnestra? Reading about the chaos and political conflict of the 1960s might be more apropos. And perhaps the 1960s provide a good first approach to Aeschylus.

Over Easter weekend in 1964, the Kennedy family was on vacation in Antigua. They had, like the nation itself, been rocked by the assassination of the forty-six-year-old president Kennedy just months before. Bobby Kennedy felt particularly lost. Both of his older brothers had died violent deaths: Joe Kennedy had been killed during World War II, and now Jack had been shot on the streets of Dallas. In this tropical paradise Bobby found himself brooding and unhappy.

His sister-in-law Jackie Kennedy had been telling him he should start reading “the Greeks.” And she gave him, as a starter, Edith Hamilton’s book The Greek Way. Bobby locked himself in his room and read the book in one evening, beginning a long meditation on Greek literature — and Aeschylus most of all — that would continue until his own tragic death at the hands of an assassin four years later.

What did Jackie and Bobby Kennedy find in that book? Well, a glance at Edith Hamilton’s chapter on Aeschylus makes it clear why the Kennedy clan thought it relevant:

When Nietzsche made his famous definition of tragic pleasure he fixed his eyes, like all the other philosophers in like case, not on the Muse herself but on a single tragedian. His “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed” is not the tragedy of Sophocles nor the tragedy of Euripides, but it is the very essence of the tragedy of Aeschylus. (173)

Reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and joy reclaimed for the survivors. That’s the promise Hamilton makes for Aeschylus in the first paragraph of her chapter on him. By the end of the chapter she is talking about how to find meaning in suffering, quoting one of the early choruses from the Agamemnon:

God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop on the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Bobby Kennedy would quote this in his speech of April 4, 1968, during a campaign stop in Indianapolis, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby would himself be assassinated two months later. The same quotation now graces the memorial steps from his grave.

Reaffirmation of the will to live. Making meaning out of suffering. And more: overcoming a past of hatred and bloodshed; creating out of the mess we inherit something good and orderly and beautiful; keeping faith that after every night there will be born a new morning. This is the work of Aeschylus; and I think you will see why we have found ourselves reading him in 2020, more than 2,500 years after his birth.

In the first installment of the series, I discuss Aeschylus’s Suppliants, and its trilogy’s motion from a wedding-night massacre to the triumph of Aphrodite: