Justice in the Oresteia
The Oresteia trilogy, which includes the plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, has justice as its central theme. Aeschylus wrote these plays sometime during the period after the end of the Persian wars, when the star of Athens was on its ascendancy. It was the dawn of a new age, marked by the establishment of a new socio-political order based on democracy and the rule of law. The rule of law meant the institutionalization of justice. Justice was no longer a personal responsibility to be meted out according to the rule of family vendetta - blood for blood; it was now a state responsibility embodied in the law that the state, representing the community as a whole, set ...
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that. But as long as the family was the sovereign unit of society, the nerve centre of social life, women had voice and representation. However, with the shifting of power from the family to the polis, and the organization of society into complex formal institutions that assumed authority to set down rules governing social life, the alienation and marginalization of women was complete.
The parallel transformation in the order of justice and the gender equation becomes evident as The Oresteia trilogy progresses. In the first play, Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra murders Agamemnon to avenge the sacrifice of Iphigeneia in accordance with the ethic of revenge, the brutal code of revenge killing that demanded that a person's murder be avenged in kind by his/her close blood relative. It also called for torment at the hands of the Furies, female divinities of a terrible nightmarish aspect, for anyone who murdered a close blood relative. In the second play, The Libation Bearers, Orestes ...
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The Furies who preside over this order are subservient to no other god, for, as they claim, "The Fates who gave us power made us free" (E 352). They are roused to action by matricide but remain indifferent to the killing of a husband by his wife. However, when this state of affairs, "where justice and bloody slaughter are the same" (E 184) gives way to a more evolved form of justice culminating in the trial at the areopagus, the forces of patriarchy, too, win the day. Apollo's arguments in defense of Orestes are rabidly patriarchal, all based on the fundamental notion that a woman's life is worth less than that of a man. There are many inconsistencies in his strident justification of ...
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"Justice in the Oresteia." Essayworld.com. April 23, 2014. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Justice-in-the-Oresteia/103992.
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