When reading about Aeschylus, one finds with at least some regularity the claim that Karl Marx reread Aeschylus or the Oresteia every year. A representative example is found in the entry on Aeschylus in The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis.

For [Victor] Hugo, Aeschylus was “Shakespeare l’ancien.” Swinburne considered the Oresteia “the greatest spiritual poem in the world”;^[1] Marx reread it every year, and Engels made it a central text in his study of the origins of the family and the state.

I recently decided to track down the source of the big about Marx, for which no citation is given here.

After a rather circuitous journey, I finally found it.

The authority for the statement is Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who mentions it in a set of Errinerungen (“Memories” or “Recollections”) of Marx in the journal Die Neue Zeit in 1891. Lafargue writes:

Heine und Goethe, die er oft im Gespräche zitirte, wusste er auswendig; er las stets Dicther, die er aus allen europäischen Literaturen wählte; jedes Jahr las er Aeschylos im grieschischen Urtext; ihm und Shakespeare verehrte er als die beiden grössten dramatischen Genies, welche die Menschheit hervorgebracht. Shakespeare, für den seine Verehrung unbegrenzt war, hatte er zum Gegenstand eingehendster Studien gemacht; er kannte auch seine geringügigsten Figuren.

In English, from here:

He knew Heine and Goethe by heart and often quoted them in his conversations; he was an assiduous reader of poets in all European languages. Every year he read Aeschylus in the Greek original. He considered him and Shakespeare as the greatest dramatic geniuses humanity ever gave birth to. His respect for Shakespeare was boundless: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters. 

Now, Marx unleashed more death on the world than perhaps any single individual in human history, which I guess just goes to show that reading the right books–even the great ones–doesn’t of itself make you wise. Incidentally, this–speaking of the English bard–is one of Shakespeare’s points in Titus Andronicus, according to my late colleague Grace Starry West.^[2]

She’s right. Indeed, Titus Andronicus might be taken as a blueprint for the horrors Marx, great lover of Shakespeare that he appears to have been,^[3] unleashed on the world–a cautionary tale for those of us who love the great books and classical education.