"Time as he grows old teaches all things"
About this Quote
Aeschylus gives Time the starring role, but not as a gentle sage. In "Time as he grows old teaches all things", time is personified as an aging man whose education comes through accumulation: scars, aftermaths, repetitions. The line isn’t comforting; it’s a sober claim that knowledge arrives less by insight than by endurance. You don’t master life by being clever. You learn because events keep happening and you keep surviving them, long enough for patterns to become legible.
The phrasing matters. "As he grows old" suggests that time itself changes in our perception: youth experiences time as a blank, almost weightless medium; age experiences it as dense, crowded with evidence. Time “teaches” the way tragedy teaches - not through instruction, but through consequence. In Aeschylean drama, characters are often trapped inside moral systems larger than their intentions: blood debt, divine law, civic order. What finally clarifies those systems is not a tidy moral lesson but the long arc of repercussion. Time is the only tutor patient enough to let cause and effect finish their slow work.
Contextually, Aeschylus is writing for an Athens obsessed with judgment - legal, civic, cosmic. His tragedies repeatedly stage the transition from private vengeance to public justice, and that transition requires something like historical memory: the ability to look back and see what violence begets. The subtext is almost political: wisdom isn’t a personal virtue you can claim early; it’s a communal product, purchased at the price of years, errors, and grief.
The phrasing matters. "As he grows old" suggests that time itself changes in our perception: youth experiences time as a blank, almost weightless medium; age experiences it as dense, crowded with evidence. Time “teaches” the way tragedy teaches - not through instruction, but through consequence. In Aeschylean drama, characters are often trapped inside moral systems larger than their intentions: blood debt, divine law, civic order. What finally clarifies those systems is not a tidy moral lesson but the long arc of repercussion. Time is the only tutor patient enough to let cause and effect finish their slow work.
Contextually, Aeschylus is writing for an Athens obsessed with judgment - legal, civic, cosmic. His tragedies repeatedly stage the transition from private vengeance to public justice, and that transition requires something like historical memory: the ability to look back and see what violence begets. The subtext is almost political: wisdom isn’t a personal virtue you can claim early; it’s a communal product, purchased at the price of years, errors, and grief.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
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