Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. This book retraces the trajectories of Greek ancestral fault and the varieties of its expression through the many genres and centuries where it is found.

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Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece

A trilogy? Two of Aeschylus’ plays strike me as closing in odd ways. In the Persians the hero, who is rather like an anti-hero of modern theatre, asks the Chorus to “weep and howl.” Xerxes seems to be saying the line of Orestes: “I have been beaten and been taught.” (Eum. 276) Indeed he has. He has suffered and the pathei mathos of Xerxes is exactly what we should expect from the second play of an Aeschylean trilogy. As for the ending of the Seven Against Thebes, that, too, is appropriate to a third play in the trilogy. But let us look at the earlier play and trilogy for Lattimore seems justified in writing that the Persians “is certainly the oldest extant Greek tragedy.”1

Plays with Odd Endings: Persians and Seven Against Thebes

Aeschylus can be seen to be following the version of the myth reported by Hellanicus and others, that Eteocles inherited Thebes in justice and Polyneices emigrated, reflecting a system of primogeniture.

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H. D. Cameron

Papers

‘Epigoni’ and the Law of Inheritance in Aeschylus’ Septem