Forms of Justice in Aeschylus’ Eumenides

The Classical Review, 2010

Classical Antiquity, 2006

This paper argues that Aeschylus' Eumenides presents a coherent geography that, when associated with the play's judicial proceedings, forms the basis of an imperial ideology. The geography of Eumenides constitutes a form of mapping, and mapping is associated with imperial power. The significance of this mapping becomes clear when linked to fifth-century Athens' growing judicial imperialism. The creation of the court inEumenides, in the view of most scholars, refers only to Ephialtes' reforms of 462 BC. But in the larger context, Athenian courts in the mid-fifth century are a form of imperial control. When geographically specific jurisdiction combines with new courts, it supports and even creates a developing imperial ideology. Moreover, the figure of Athena and the role she gives the Athenian jury emphasizes a passionate pro-Athenian nationalism, a nationalism that the text connects to Athens' geographic and judicial superiority. This imperial ideology did not sp...

Abstract Since the XIX century, a pleiad of philosophers and historians support the idea that Greek philosophy, usually reported to have started with the presocratics, lays its basis in a previous moment: the Greek myths – systematized by Homer and Hesiod – and the Greek arts, in particular the lyric and tragedy literature. According to this, it is important to retrieve philosophical elements even before the presocratics to understand the genesis of specific concepts in Philosophy of Law. Besides, assuming that the Western’s core values are inherited from Ancient Greece, it is essential to recuperate the basis of our own justice idea, through the Greek myths and tragedy literature. As a case study, this paper aims on the comparison of two key-works, each one representing a phase of the Greek tragedy: The Orestea, by Aeschylus, and Orestes, by Euripides. Both contain the same story, telling how the Greeks understood the necessity of solving their conflicts not by blood revenge, but through a political way, and also the political drama. Although, in Aeschylus’s one, men still leashed by their fate, while the gods play a major role, in order to punish human pride (hybris). In a different way, on Euripides’s work men face their own loneliness, in a world fulfilled with gods, each one demanding divergent actions. That represents a necessary moment to the flourishing freedom and human subjectivity, and, once the exterior divinity is unable to resolve human problems, men will need to discover their interior divinity: that is how the Philosophy emerges.

Despite the title, this chapter is not an overview of the idea of justice (dikē) in the tragedies of Aeschylus and intersects only tangentially with discussions of the idea and institution of justice in ancient Greece. My concerns here have much to do rather with the materials of metaphor, how they are related to time, and how both are related to justice, that is: the material and temporal means by which Aeschylus allows justice to be imagined, as well as what material realities of justice are occluded by this imagining. My argument begins with a recognition of Aeschylus's repeated attention to the written word-indeed, the inscribed word-in his representations of justice. I use the word "inscribed" because even in the cases in this chapter where I use the term "written", writing should be understood as the outcome of a deliberate and sometimes laborious act, one that has left marks or indentations on a surface, some of which, some of the time, could be considered indelible. This is not necessarily what writing means in this day and age, when most of it involves the movement of digital particles across a screen. But writing in the age of Aeschylus was an intrinsically physical activity, especially when it took the form of inscription on stone. It was enacted by corporeal effort upon a substance, hardly less so than sculpting. The meaning and implications of writing thus are all connected to its physicality and degree of visibility in the world. Indeed it is the physicality of written texts that places them into space in a way that also raises the question of whether they will endure through time. And if there is one thing that justice requires, at least justice in its desirable form, it is time, particularly a sense of a reasonably predictable future or futurity. The possibility of such a future allows for an idea of justice as abstract and disinterested. Thus one important use of inscription from the classical period was the incising of laws for public display, particularly in Athens (see Gagarin 2008). Such highly visible inscriptions disconnected law and justice from the personhood of the basileis and made laws into promises. There was perhaps the additional connection of inscribed, public laws to another form of justice, namely, trial by jury, which "empowered and instructed citizens" to "perform justice according to a new script" (Farenga 2006, 265). Laws that are visible and lasting through inscription, after all, are available to be widely and fairly applied by any competent party.

In contrast to the “neat” illustration of justice one receives from Aristotle's ethics and politics, I pose Greek tragedy as encapsulating the “messiness” of justice—the tribulations of paying what is due and the anguish in the irreconcilability of action and intention. Sophocles’ Antigone in particular is a tragedy in which one witnesses the augmentation of Aristotle’s conception of justice in the Ethics and Politics. Not only does Antigone problematize the relationship between justice and law, but in many ways the play represents what is at stake in justice distinguished from all other virtues, while tragically reframing the notion of equity and the difficulty of situating justice in the rich life of the community. In this paper I wish to explore the way that justice is operative in the corpus of the law of the political community, according to Aristotle, and examine the same complications through the lens of Antigone. In particular, I argue that by reading Sophocles’ Antigone as a response to Aeschylus’ The Eumenides (or The Oresteia trilogy, broadly), one is confronted by Sophocles’ reprisal of questions concerning justice and just relations—i.e. responsibility, rulership, obligation, rectification, absolution—indicating that these questions do not cease to be necessary with the institution of the polis and civic law. Quite the contrary, Antigone shows us how taking for granted that what is lawful is necessarily what is just, and consequently failing to cultivate the virtue of justice in one’s character, is not merely reprehensible, but can have tragic consequences.

Papyri - Scientific Journal

CHRISTOPHER VASILLOPULOS, Professor, Eastern Connecticut State University, U.S.A. The achievement of the Aeschylean reconciliation or at the least conflict resolu¬tion of the com-peting conceptions of justice personified by the Old and the New Gods, which culminates the Eumeni-des, amounts to the discovery of the political. The needs of the polis, defined as a citizenry who be-lieved the affairs of the state were at their dis¬posal, now dominate the otherwise implacable and literal requirements of the old dis¬pensation. Without questioning the legitimacy of the pre-political concep-tion of justice, conceived as revenge and retribution, which binds Orestes, Aeschylus confounds the demands of the Furies and in the process legitimates a new juris/political order. Essen¬tially, by insti-tuting a trial, whose jury is twelve citizens, Aeschylus substitutes a new conception of justice, now conceived as “due process.” The scare quotes are needed because Athena remains part of the procedure. With this qualifi-cation, now justice is within the polis and so are the Furies in their new guise as the Well-Disposed. With the indispensable help of Athena, in defiance of Apollo, Athenians are no longer objects of the de-structive cycle of revenge and retribution which characterized pre-political conception of justice. To demonstrate the possibilities of this new form of justice, Athena while offering her good offices, casts the determining vote in Orestes’ trial. There is more to this than a goddess biasing a verdict. What al-lows the political emerge from her perhaps shoddy practice is the undeniable need to transcend ab-solutist notions of justice, to interpose space between the event/response cycle for pragmatic human concerns. Justice becomes politicized, that is, becomes ac¬countable to the decisional modes of the citi-zenry, if not entirely in their hands. In the Medea Euripides offers a complex and perhaps less com-promising variant of ju¬ris / political conflict resolution. He tries to allow for the untransformed pres-ence of the implacable, but without the gods, Old or New. By appreciating the substantive and the pro-cedural properties of obligation, Euripides suggest a way to retain the irrational pre-political sense of justice without its property of the cycle of retribution and without a sense of justice compromised due to human pragmatics. Euripides is not suggesting that in this case, it is not prudent to apply the old conception of justice. He indicates that the Old cannot be dispensed with; echoing the transformation of the Furies into the Well-disposed, but needs a new guise. The obligation to keep promises becomes the func¬tional equivalent of an Absolute. Against this standard, the prudential arguments of Ja¬son can¬not prevail. No trial ensues, as in Eumenides, nevertheless Euripides’s obvious sympathy for Medea and his disgust with Jason suggests that should she have been tried, a more sophisticated and polis friendly result would have resulted. But since Medea could not get to Athens, the trial becomes moot. She reverts to her persona as a goddess of the Old dispensation. In an important sense, she applies the old conception of justice against her human persona as well as Jason. Euripides suggests that an Athe¬nian polis and citizenry could have avoided this catastrophe because it might have understood his con-ception of justice, wherein the implacable becomes politicized without losing its power as an absolute.

2012

Mourning, Murder, and Mutable Kinship 7 I. Notes 28 Chapter Two Orestes and the Construction of Peitho 30 Chapter Three The Violence of the Law: Peitho and the Impossibility of Justice 47 Works Cited Hobbs 5 establishing a system of popular (as opposed to aristocratic) justice, where individual citizens, through the system of tribunals, regulated "what was formerly the object of a sort of contest among the gene of noble families" (279). While the tragic contest functioned as a microcosm of the deliberative process of democratic justice, the polis itself was concerned with redefining its citizenry along more democratic lines, which involved reducing the power of noble families to influence the populace through eroding the social signifiers of their importance. In the fifth and sixth centuries, this meant placing limits on the self-identifying rituals of aristocratic mourning. Solon in the sixth century BC and Pericles in the fifth oversaw significant changes to funeral practices, passing laws that limited the length and lavishness of the public funerals of nobility as well as decreeing that they be confined to the private sphere and celebrated only by the close family of the deceased. The prothesis (wake), formerly public, now took place in the dead man's house and was closed to outsiders; and the ekphora (funeral procession) was forbidden from the use of professional mourners, generally women over sixty skilled at inducing grief (Foley 22). The quarantine of aristocratic grief to the private sphere insulated the polis from the destructive effects of wild displays of lamentation. Archaic funerals had served as "an occasion at which the members of aristocratic families or broader groups of kin could gather and display their wealth, power, and generosity to a wider public," Helene Foley remarks, and "may well have provided opportunities for rival aristocratic kin groups to make public displays of emotion that fostered vendettas or consolidated private rather than public interests" (22, 23). What is particularly interesting about the legal regulation of grief is that the ordinances regarding mourning applied almost exclusively to women. Believed to aid the dead in their transition to the underworld, funeral lament in ancient Greece was the particular domain of Hobbs 6 women, and female lament, Foley reminds us, played "a prominent role at every stage" of the funeral rites: ...at the wake or prothesis, during the ekphora in which the body was carried by chariot to the grave site, and at the grave site itself. …The sixth-century legislation purportedly prohibited above all, to quote Plutarch, 'everything disorderly and excessive in women's festivals, processions [exodoi] and funeral rites.' (22) Such lament, Charles Segal notes, was also associated with "a maenadlike release of uncontrollable and disturbing emotions," source of "an unpredictable and uncontrollable cycle of vendettas" (119). The disruptive power of female lament-capable of arousing in the hearts and minds of citizens a thirst for vengeance for the deaths of their brothers and sons, and fomenting a cycle of violence that could bring the city to its knees-was dangerous to the unity and smooth functioning of the polis, and from this arose the impulse to keep it strictly controlled. By sanctioning corybantic female grief among the aristocracy, the polis affected a shift in the prevailing philosophy of loss: the "pure grief" at the death of a loved one, the focus of female lament, was replaced by "a masculine and civic effacement of death's sorrow in civic 'glory'" (Segal 121). In his famous funeral oration of 431 BC, Pericles set the precedent for the absorption of the individual, private losses of families into the public sphere, promising 'a most conspicuous tomb' for those who died in the service of the city (Segal 120). Such a 'conspicuous tomb,' according to Segal, consisted of an assurance of civic immortality, "a memorial in the thoughts of men that does not need recording in writing. In such public rituals," he explains, "the death of the individual is given continuity in the ongoing life of the community and its public functions" (120). In this way, the aristocratic "cult of the hero" was democratized; every man who died for the polis became the subject of civic glorification, and was able to be claimed Hobbs 7 by every citizen (Foley 25). What does it mean, then, that tragedy presents precisely these forbidden funeral practices onstage? Nicole Loraux offers two possible answers. In her earlier writing, Bonnie Honig explains, Loraux believed that by the institution of the tragic contest the city appropriated to itself the dangerous methods of female mourning, staging the banned laments in the space of the theater in such a way as to impress the audience into identification with the polis (7). In her later writing, however, Loraux reexamines tragedy's relationship to the city and finds it subversive rather than complicit (Honig 7). Instead of imposing civic ideology on the members of the audience, Honig writes of Loraux, perhaps tragic theatre invited the audience to join an extra-or non-political community by the use of the "non-discursive" sounds of lament, which are a "universal voice, cry, or suffering" (7). Rather than being purely mimetic in its representation of mourning, Loraux contends that tragic theatre presents an archetypal version of the mourning mother-not merely a portrayal of funeral practice, but a model for it. The lament rejected from the public political sphere finds its way into the theater, where it becomes not less dangerous, but more. Tragedy embodies lament; the prohibited mourning presented onstage dramatizes "the essential exclusions the city has instituted for the citizens' use:" the exclusion of women from the funeral and from the family points to an injustice the polis prefers not to acknowledge (Loraux 11). It is with an understanding of this context that we read Aeschylus' Oresteia, exceptional within the tragic canon not for staging displays of banned funeral lament, but for its lack of them. The events of the Oresteia enact the extreme results of political (in the sense of sanctioned by the polis) suppression of mourning by explicitly dramatizing its effects on the family. The Oresteia is deeply concerned with mourning as a means of identification: the family mourns its own; those deaths that the family does not mourn are necessarily outside the family. Trouble Hobbs 8 arises when deaths within the family are not mourned, for how then are its members to recognize each other? Each of the three deaths in the Oresteia-Iphigeneia's death at her father Agamemnon's hand, Agamemnon's death by his wife Clytemnestra, and Clytemnestra's by her son Orestes-is in an effort to define the family, and the position within (or without) it of both the murderer and the murdered. What appear to be three identical crimes, however, reveal themselves to be subtly different in intention and object, even as they mirror each other in form. That the murders within the Oresteia are intrafamilial places them at a crucial intersection of divine (archaic, religious) and human (modern, political) law. While it is certainly true that, as Helene Foley notes, one can trace in the plays "an evolution from a remote archaic world to one that closely prefigures the institutions of classical actions," such a purely programmatic view of the role of justice in tragedy neglects to consider the significance of its evolution (26). The Oresteia's performance of the transition from the law of vendetta to the law of the courts is not in question; what Foley and other scholars fail to connect is the self-identification of lament, synonymous with vendetta and therefore legally regulated and suppressed, with the preservation of the family and the internal recognition of its members. The murders among the Atreidae would be less extraordinary if they were not unmourned: but that each death initially is unmourned throws the boundaries of the family-and, as the royal family, the city-into flux. In the Oresteia, the law isn't just represented in tragedy. The law engenders tragedy.

Aeschylus' Oresteia supports Aristotle's claim about the naturalness of the city and the city's role in shaping justice for humans. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus shows how the city's justice is the only way to control the wrath of the Furies (which symbolize the power of blood ties and the family bonds). Aeschylus shows that the city and its justice tames the Furies and provides for the only way by which the husband-wife relation, which is not a blood tie but provides the basis for which the family (the source of blood ties) is even possible, can be preserved and be secure from the passions the Furies release in their quest for revenge. The Furies and their desire for vengeance for the violation of the blood bond, threaten to undermine the vary basis on which the family is founded: the husband-wife bond. Thus Aeschylus gives support and aids Aristotle's position that the husband-wife bond is a political bond and rests within the realm of the city and the political.

Ethics in Progress, 2016

This article discusses three trial scenes from three different ancient Greek novels (by Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Longus), in which naïve justice seems to be deliberately subverted. The titular concept of “naïve justice” is defined here in terms borrowed from Aristotle’s Poetics, where the term “double resolution” is used, disparagingly, of plots in which the good characters are all rewarded and the bad characters all punished. The argument is made that the trial scenes under discussion should raise doubts in the reader’s mind as to which of the parties is truly guilty, and which is truly innocent. This can be seen as a reflection of unexpectedly mature ethical sensibilities on the part of these often-underestimated writers, who seem to have grasped that the “double resolution” may make the reader feel good, but has little to do with the real world.

Review of Politics, 2022

In 330 BCE, before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens, the statesman Demosthenes delivered what would become his most famous court speech, On the Crown. Commentators have called the speech "tragic" owing to the litigant's unusual appropriation of tropes from Attic tragedy to make his case. I offer an alternative reading of Demosthenes's speech that rests upon an alternative approach to theorizing democratic judgment. I argue that the rhetorical force and political significance of Demosthenes's metaphors, linguistic expressions and ideas depend upon the institutional setting in which they were delivered. This is because within each institutional site, a specific political practice of judgment is taking place that structures the reception of and response to ideas and images. Demosthenes's speech is in fact "anti-tragic" and reflects the democratic practice for which it was created.