Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, appears to be out for revenge for the treatment of his sister by the King, particularly for a phone call in which he claimed that Prince Charles, as he then was, said :‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.’ Aristotle would have been delighted at how precisely the Earl’s reaction matched his analysis of the angry man.
The emotions, said Aristotle, especially anger, alter one’s judgment, causing both distress but also pleasure. At this point Aristotle quotes Achilles who in the Iliad (the epic of Achilles’s destructive wrath) acknowledged anger as ‘far sweeter than oozing honey, spreading in a man’s heart and expanding like smoke’ (what an image!). Aristotle then defines anger as a desire for revenge in response to being belittled by someone with contempt, spite or insult. It is those feelings that Spencer nourishes in response to Charles’s ‘Rest assured’ comment. But it is perfectly possible that Charles was clumsily reaching out for one of the oldest clichés in the world in an attempt to console the Earl. Likewise, Diana’s comment about Charles being in ‘love with his valet’ probably meant nothing more than a Geordie saying her man is in love with Alan Shearer. But a man on a revenge mission will brook no retreat. We seek revenge, says Aristotle, because we believe the offender wronged us; we want to cause him pain so that he will not wrong us a second time. That will teach him a lesson and bring us a degree of pleasurable satisfaction.
Spencer clearly felt that Charles’s reaction at that time was an insult to himself, his sister and the whole family. The common ground is that no institution was of more importance to Greeks than the family: everything they held dear centred on it. Since nothing had greater potential for tragic consequences, the family was at the heart of Greek tragedy. The tragedians therefore fastened onto the vast range of myths centring on the family and explored what it took for a man or woman to misread so obsessively what was most precious to them as to destroy it – and themselves.
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