"Time brings all things to pass"
About this Quote
“Time brings all things to pass” isn’t comfort; it’s a verdict. Coming from Aeschylus, the tragedian who stages gods, kings, and families grinding themselves into ruin, the line carries the chill of inevitability. Time here isn’t a gentle healer. It’s the mechanism that makes hidden debts collectible.
Aeschylus writes in a civic world newly obsessed with law, responsibility, and public consequence. Athens is experimenting with democracy while still haunted by older codes: blood vengeance, inherited curses, divine retribution. His dramas repeatedly ask what it means to escape a cycle when every act plants a seed for the next catastrophe. In that context, “time” becomes the one force no character can bribe, outrun, or out-argue. The arrogant may win the scene, but time wins the play.
The subtext is political as much as spiritual. Time “brings to pass” not only personal punishments but social reckonings: tyrants fall, house-of-Atreus secrets surface, private violence becomes public trial. It’s a warning to the powerful that history has a memory even when a city pretends it doesn’t. It’s also a grim reassurance to the wronged: justice may be delayed, but delay is not dismissal.
What makes the line work is its brutal neutrality. No moral language, no divine name, no promise of mercy. Just a simple engine turning. In tragedy, that simplicity is the sharpest blade.
Aeschylus writes in a civic world newly obsessed with law, responsibility, and public consequence. Athens is experimenting with democracy while still haunted by older codes: blood vengeance, inherited curses, divine retribution. His dramas repeatedly ask what it means to escape a cycle when every act plants a seed for the next catastrophe. In that context, “time” becomes the one force no character can bribe, outrun, or out-argue. The arrogant may win the scene, but time wins the play.
The subtext is political as much as spiritual. Time “brings to pass” not only personal punishments but social reckonings: tyrants fall, house-of-Atreus secrets surface, private violence becomes public trial. It’s a warning to the powerful that history has a memory even when a city pretends it doesn’t. It’s also a grim reassurance to the wronged: justice may be delayed, but delay is not dismissal.
What makes the line work is its brutal neutrality. No moral language, no divine name, no promise of mercy. Just a simple engine turning. In tragedy, that simplicity is the sharpest blade.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
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