Flu and its books 3

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How many times can one read Aeschylus without getting tired, but learning new lessons?

I've just had the courage to "waste" some time, and re-read the Oresteia, wasting time being what I do when - instead of reading something new and climb the Olympus of the Unread a few hundred pages higher - I indulge myself in revisiting a favourite text, lingering in the valley of the well-known and familiar.

What a pleasure. The intensity of the existential choices, the purity of a culture that was able to open the book of life with philosophical eyes for the first time. I wish I could say "Ich bin ein Athenian!"

One way of reading the Oresteia is, of course, in terms of the emergence of that civilization, represented by fair law and justice, that will stay with human history forever after, at least as a regulative ideal. It was invented by the Greeks and globalised by the Romans.

In the end, the Eumenides and their thirst for revenge are irregimented by an Athens who judges fairly and firmly. Without any real recourse to transcendent powers or holy scriptures, Greek culture tells us clearly and loudly that, already twentyfive centuries ago, men of principles, with a critical mind, would have consider any Guantanamo Bay uncivilised and worthy of barbarians. Let the Furies go. Nice lesson from Aeschylus for the far-too-religiously-fundamentalist America.

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