Love Quote by Aeschylus

Hatred here isn’t a weapon so much as an infection: something you host, something that lives close enough to the heart to alter your breathing. Aeschylus reaches for the bodily metaphor because Greek tragedy is obsessed with consequences that aren’t abstract. Emotions are not private “feelings” in his world; they are forces that deform perception, pull families into cycles of retaliation, and turn the inside of a person into a battleground.

The line’s trick is its doubling. Hatred doesn’t merely add pain; it compounds it. First you carry the original wound (the “sorrow” that likely sparked resentment), then you inherit a second, parasitic misery: the inability to tolerate anyone else’s good fortune. That’s a darkly practical definition of envy, but Aeschylus frames it as self-punishment, not moral failure. The hater becomes the primary casualty, lugging around an illness that makes ordinary life - other people laughing, thriving, being loved - feel like an affront.

Subtextually, the quote also reads like political and civic instruction. Aeschylus wrote in a culture where personal vendetta could metastasize into public catastrophe; his plays repeatedly stage how private rage becomes communal ruin. Calling hatred “poison” is a warning about contamination: it spreads inward first, then outward.

Even the phrasing “seated near the heart” suggests choice and habituation. The hatred isn’t a passing flare; it settles in, takes a chair, becomes part of the household. Tragedy’s most brutal insight is that suffering can be addictive - and that the price is losing the capacity to witness happiness without pain.