Why Aeschylus Still Matters Today

“But Aeschylus’ cosmos goes beyond Homer’s in presenting Reason, Persuasion, as an integral aspect of the cosmos that was otherwise absent in Homer.”

Aeschylus is considered the greatest of the Greek playwrights. His Oresteia remains one of the few tripartite classics of Western literature; a play and its threefold movement serve as a stirring window into the progression and development of antique literature and consciousness. C.J. Herington argued that the Oresteia includes “a gradual climb from torment, through testing, into the light.”

Why is Aeschylus the acme of the Greek playwright tradition, and why is he so important? On one hand, Aeschylus is great because his work is the manifestation of a long literary-philosophical tradition that was wrestling with the cosmogonic idea of strife. On another hand, it is because his works represent the ideal movement of humanity from strife, rage, and hate, to justice, love, and persuasion, which is the very spirit of civilization after all these millennia.

Cosmogony: From Strife to Strife and Love

Hesiod’s Theogony is a sublimely violent poem where the muses sing praises to the gods who engage in patricide and usurpation. The gods, which were conceived in lust and hatred, have nothing but lust and hatred toward their fathers (Uranus among the Titans and Cronus among the Olympians). Cronus castrates Uranus and his blood and phallus fall to the earth and sea giving rise to monsters and birthing Aphrodite from the open womb of Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea. Strife reigns supreme in Hesiod’s grand epic and is that which the muses sing in praise of.

Giambattista Vico argued that sublime poetry is the first—and primitive—instantiation of logos in human life. While Homer may have composed his grand epics before Hesiod, or around the same time, it is without question that Hesiod’s cosmos is the older one. Homer’s cosmos, while retaining much of the strife of Hesiod, is radically subversive. In this respect, Homer was the radical altering the Greek understanding of the cosmos while Hesiod was the reactionary trying to preserve—if not otherwise, return—to the more ancient cosmos of strife, blood, and guts.