Parenting & Family Quote by Aeschylus

Sin, in Aeschylus, is rarely a private lapse. It is a seed with a violent inheritance clause. "For the impious act begets more after it, like to the parent stock" frames wrongdoing as reproductive: one breach of the sacred order generates descendants, not just consequences. The metaphor does a lot of work. "Begets" pulls morality into the realm of bloodlines and breeding, while "stock" turns a household into an orchard of fate. You do not simply commit an offense; you cultivate a lineage of it.

The intent is partly theological, partly political. In the world of Greek tragedy, "impious" isn't generic bad behavior; it's an insult to the gods, to guest-friendship, to burial rites, to the rituals that keep a city intelligible to itself. Aeschylus wrote for an Athens where civic stability depended on shared reverence, and the stage was a public forum. Casting impiety as self-multiplying warns that sacrilege corrodes the social fabric in ways no court can neatly contain.

The subtext is a bleak diagnosis of human institutions: families and states are engines of repetition. Aeschylus is fascinated by how violence and arrogance become tradition, passed down as if they were virtues. Think of the House of Atreus, where one outrage authorizes the next, each actor claiming necessity, justice, or payback. The line also smuggles in a critique of rationalization; once you permit the first "exception", you normalize the pattern. Tragedy’s terror comes from that momentum: the terrible sense that the future has already been bred.