Feb 20 2025 53 mins 4
Cycles of violence. Legacies handed from famous fathers to uncertain sons. The trajectory of a society moving from retribution to democracy and justice. Robert F. Kennedy probably did not have all these things in mind on April 4, 1968 when he announced the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. to a crowd in Indianapolis. But he brought them to the surface nevertheless by quoting the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, father of tragedy in his successful attempt to keep the city at peace on that terrible night: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
It was a scene worthy of Aeschylus himself. This week, walk through the plot of the Oresteia, the only complete triology of Aeschylus's we still have. It tells the story of a family laboring under a curse, and how that curse came to be lifted.
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