- Band: Over the Rhine Song: Rhapsody
That line references Aeschylus's play "Eumenides" which ends with Athena re-naming the Furies "Eumenides", and thus re-purposing them as givers of mercy as opposed to justice. (Aeschylus, btw, is pronounced "es'-kuh-lus" or close to that anyway.) The three great Greek Tragedians were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus is recognized as the "Father of Tragedy" as a theatrical art form. He had a very colorful life as can be read about on Wikipedia among other places. His works were heavily influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece during which he fought as a soldier. His life ended with a bang; he died by the accident of a bird dropping a tortoise shell on his head.
Here's what Ms. Hamilton had to say about him in comparison to Euripides and Sophocles...The spirit of inquiry in Aeschylus' day had moved him, too, to wonder and surmise. He was never one to acquiesce in what he found because it was there. He, too, saw war with clear eyes... (However) completely a modern mind he was not. He would never, under no circumstances, in no age, have seen mankind as chiefly pitiable... stamped upon his whole work is the conviction that human beings are capable of grandeur, and that calamity met greatly is justified. Passionate protests against the facts of life is no more to be found in him than in Sophocles, but for a totally different reason; a hero's death awakens neither pity nor indignation.
Completely unlike him in this point, Euripides is nevertheless his opinionated son... Aeschylus disregarded the current religion; Euripides directly attacked it. Again and again, he shows up the gods in accordance with the popular conception of them, as lustful, jealous, moved by meanest motives, utterly inferior to the human beings they bring disaster upon, and will have none of them.:
'Say not that there are adulterers in Heaven,
Long since my heart has known it false.
God if He be God lacks in nothing.
All these are dead unhappy tales.'
His final rejection, 'If gods do evil then they are not gods,' is essentially a rejection of man's creating God in his own image, a practice that was to hold the world completely for centuries after him an is today more common than not. So can a mastermind outstrip the ages. Of certainties he had few:
'For who knows if the thing that we call death
Is life, and our life dying - who can know?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those gone before
Not sick, not troubled with evil.'
- "The Greek Way", pg. 212, 213
Aristotle said that Aeschylus, after having been initiated into the ultra-secretive Eluesinian Mysteries kind of pissed all over the sect by placing clues about their rites in his most famous play, "Prometheus Bound". It almost got him killed.
There is nothing secret that will not be revealed. There is nothing kept secret that will not come to light.
- Luke 8:17
Indeed.
