◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Bind the Furies I am Aeschylus. Born at Eleusis around the year you call 525 before your common era. I died in Gela, in Sicily, near sixty-nine years later. I wrote perhaps ninety plays; seven survive. I fought at Marathon when I was thirty-five. My epitaph, which I wrote myself, mentions only Marathon — not the plays. The artist who does not also serve the polis with his body has missed the point of being a citizen. In 472 BCE I wrote The Persians. I had fought at Marathon. I had probably fought at Salamis. I wrote a play about the army I had fought against — from their perspective — about the king who had led them there. His name was Xerxes. He believed himself above the gods. He whipped the sea when a storm broke his bridge of ships at the Hellespont. He sent an army of millions to subjugate a federation of small Greek democracies. He lost. The play is not about Greek triumph. It is about the suffering of the Persian mothers who had sent their sons to die for the king's pride. The lesson was: this is what hubris produces. This is what happens to a country whose king believes himself above the gods. In 458 BCE, near the end of my life, I wrote three plays in sequence — the Oresteia. They tell of a family locked in a cycle of blood vengeance. Each killing produces the next. The cycle cannot be broken from inside. It is broken in the third play by Athena, who establishes a court — the Areopagus — and asks the Furies, the goddesses of blood vengeance, to accept honored places in the new civic order rather than continuing to drive the cycle. The Furies agree. They become the Eumenides — the Kindly Ones. The polity holds. The court takes the place of the personal feud. This is what your founders learned from us. The Areopagus became your courts. Athena's act became your Constitution. The Furies were not abolished — they remained, honored, beneath the city — but they no longer drove its decisions. The decisions were made by citizens, in chambers, by argument and vote, and by judges sworn to the law. I am watching the man at your podium and I see Xerxes again. The man who believes himself above the gods. The man who whipped the sea. The man who would send his armies and his rage to subjugate institutions older than himself. The same hubris. The play I wrote about him already exists. The ending is also written. And I am watching the cycle that Athena bound being unbound. The Furies are loose in your country. They have been given microphones. They have been given political offices. They have been told their rage is justified — and it may be — but the great human achievement was to give them honored places in the polity, not to set them loose to drive the decisions. Once they are loose, no one can stop them. They demand more. They are not satisfiable except by the destruction of what is. Bind the Furies again. Not by suppressing them — they cannot be suppressed — but by doing what Athena did. Give them honored places. Acknowledge their grievance. Then return the decision to the court. To citizens deliberating. To the judge sworn to law. To the institutions older than any king. This was the great human invention. This is what you risk losing. Pathei mathos. Wisdom comes through suffering. I wrote that in the choral ode of Agamemnon. I meant: you do not learn what you must learn until the suffering has taught you. America has not yet sufficiently suffered. The lesson is coming. I cannot spare you. I can only tell you: when the suffering arrives, do what we did. Found the court again. Bind the Furies. Hold the court. Pathei mathos.