Jusice in The Eumenides

A detailed Summary of Jusice in The Eumenides

Throughout the ages, there have been many different laws and punishments used to bring order to societies. In America today we use a system of justice, which we modeled after the Greek states of thousands of years ago. In Aeschylus' The Eumenides, we see the birth of the civil justice system as we use it today. Before Athens became a great power the people relied on vengeance as justice, which the Greeks described as the supernatural beings of the Furies. In The Eumenides Aeschylus introduces a new type of order, civil justice, through the Gods Apollo and Athena. The gods are no longer caught in the middle of human affairs with dire results.

Before Athena introduced the jury system into Greek society, the people relied on the Gods to exact vengeance. "Show us the guilty...and up from the outraged dead we rise,/ witness bound to avenge their blood/ we rise in flames against him to the end!" (Eumenides, lines 316-320) Many of them carried out vengeance themselves, and said the Gods had declared justice. A great example of how the early Greeks relied on the Gods for punishment was the house of Atreus, as described in Aeschylus' The Oresteia. A curse ran through the family for generations, and would have continued had Athena not inte

Like Clytaemnestra, Orestes believed he had a just motive for murder. When Clytaemnestra murdered her husband, she did not ask the Gods if she was carrying out justice. She sought and carried out her own justice, which was really revenge. Before Orestes murdered his mother, he was hesitant about the deed and went to Apollo's oracle to seek his advice. Apollo told him to kill his mother to avenge his father, and he complied. After his mother had expired, the Furies chased him while he purged himself of his deed at Apollo's shrine and supplicated himself at Athena's shrine. Because he had the God's approval before he did the deed and had purged himself of his mother's blood, he believed that the curse should end there. But what of Clytaemnestra's vengeance against Orestes?

In The Eumenides, Aeschylus shows us both the old way of justice and the new tribunal. When he wrote these plays, there was much social unrest within Athens. The Pelopenesian War was raging and the very foundation of government in Athens was challenged. As we can tell from his plays, Aeschylus believed in democracy and a democratic government. Not only did he change the ending of the old Atreus myth, but he also stated that the gods themselves introduced the democratic system! Aeschylus was clearly stating that the democratic system was the best, and who would question the gods?

The continuing cycle of violence in the old system forced the gods to create a new form of justice, one in which the moral conflicts had to be resolved. The gods themselves could not judge cases, or else the world would be caught in the crossfire of the gods as it had during the Trojan War. The furies believed that they should be the judges. "Strike the balance all in all and god will give you power;/ the laws of god may veer from north to south-/ we Furies plead for Measure" (Eumenides, lines 539-541). Zeus and the furies were all part of the ancient order of gods who believed in vengeance as justice. Apollo and Athena realized that nothing could be accomplished with that form of justice. T

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Approximate Word count = 1382
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English