The Conflict of Moral Obligation in the Trilogy of Aeschylus

Extract

It will be generally admitted, I think, that Aeschylus is one of the great religious and philosophic poets of all time. And it will be perhaps hardly less generally conceded that no philosophic problem was for him more interesting or more momentous than that of establishing and defending the concept of a moral government of the world. Even those who accuse him of having subjected all things to the iron rule of Fate cannot reproach him with a blind fatalism. If he saw inexorable Necessity at the heart of the world, he also saw Justice writ large upon its face; and if he believed God and man alike to be pawns in the hands of Destiny, the rule of the game was still to punish the wrong moves of the one by the sure interposition of the other.