Justice & Law Quote by Aeschylus

Wealth, in Aeschylus, is rarely just money; it is a solvent that eats through the social order until the sacred becomes disposable. The image is brutal and theatrical: a rich man not merely ignoring Justice, but physically kicking her altar so hard it vanishes. That’s not a legal metaphor. It’s a religious crime, an act of impiety performed with the casual confidence that power won’t be audited.

The line’s intent is prosecutorial. Aeschylus is drawing a bright moral boundary around a familiar Greek anxiety: prosperity can curdle into hubris, and hubris invites punishment. “Excess” matters here. It’s not wealth as such that condemns, but wealth that overflows its civic and spiritual restraints, producing a person who treats communal norms like furniture he can rearrange. The subtext is a warning to audiences living in a city where elites financed public life while also testing the limits of accountability. Athens admired success, but feared the successful when they stopped needing the city.

Contextually, Aeschylus writes in a world where justice isn’t an abstract ideal; it’s a public practice, bound up with oaths, ritual, and the gods. The “altar” signals that Justice is not optional, not a private preference, but the infrastructure of legitimacy. Kick it out of sight and you don’t just commit a crime; you erase the conditions under which defenses even make sense. The line lands because it makes impunity feel like sacrilege, and turns inequality into a crisis of the cosmos, not just the courts.