Perhaps he had some intimation that he would soon be dead. He’d seen the Persians sack Athens and had fought against Darius at Marathon and Xerxes at Salamis, but when Aeschylus submitted what would be his last plays to Athens’s prestigious public festival, his theme was neither war nor empire but the civic origins of Athenian democracy. Treating justice in his Oresteia as the very nub of society, Aeschylus’ portrayal of the aftermath of a murder reverberates in today’s well-publicized skepticism over the legitimacy of our justice system—if only in reverse.
Aeschylus’ three Oresteia plays—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides—chronicle the return of Agamemnon to Argos, finally victorious over Troy after 10 years of warfare. His wife Clytaemnestra is happy to see him, but only in order to kill him, encouraged by her lover Aegisthus. Clytaemnestra’s claim against her husband is that he must pay for the earlier sacrifice of their young daughter Iphigenia, whose immolation had been thought necessary to release favorable winds, to carry the warriors’ ships initially to Troy.
Clytaemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon is in fact regicide. With her lover she usurps the throne, but blood must be answered in blood. This is what Clytaemnestra’s surviving daughter Electra prays for, and after years of exile and presumed death, her brother Orestes returns to fulfill her prayers, killing both Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus. The resulting crime of matricide cannot be simply washed off Orestes’ hands: He is hounded out of Argos, and we wait for his inevitable death throes, perhaps on his conflicted sister’s knifepoint, and thus her death too—suicide perhaps, crazed by grief and guilt.
Except we do not find these latter stages of tragedy. There are legitimate grievances, but there have also been gods at work, inciting some of the principals to their bloody deeds. Clytaemnestra might have been motivated by her maternal fury against Agamemnon, but Orestes is commanded by the god Apollo to avenge the slain king and promised that he won’t be punished for it. Complicating the equation is the Olympian deities’ feud with the primal gods, ancient forces who watch over the natural order and incite blood vendetta against transgressors. These are the Furies, chthonic, tribal, and matriarchal, whose bloodlust against Orestes on his mother’s account is thwarted at the last instant by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and patroness of Athens.
Athena recognizes that the rudimentary demands of justice, represented by the Furies, must be answered. But meeting each party’s demands will result in fresh affronts and more death, tearing apart the communities of men and gods in a furious escalation towards extermination. If Athena pardons Orestes and defeats the Furies, they will destroy her land; if she consigns Orestes to their rage, she offends the Olympians—a situation to avoid, if Homer is any guide. “A crisis either way. / Embrace the one? Expel the other? It defeats me.” Athena improvises, turns her ordeal into a trial, and establishes the first citizen jury. She brings civil law into being on the shards of tribal custom, which will enable families and citizens to live harmoniously together, without precluding their ability to fulfill their duties to the gods.
Athena reaches this resolution by calling 12 individuals from Athens to the Areopagus, to hear out and then cast blind ballots between the Furies (advocates for Clytaemnestra) and Orestes, for whom Apollo suddenly appears to act as counsel. Unlike the plains of Troy, where men battled each other in the larger feud of Athena against Apollo, on the Areopagus Athena enables legal judgement and creates the procedures to control it. When the jurors’ ballots are counted, they are evenly divided: Orestes and Clytaemnestra are equally innocent and equally guilty. Athena has reserved for herself the tie-breaker vote. She casts it for Orestes, but only after paying homage to the Furies and their claim of retribution.
In persuading the Furies to accept the judicial outcome, Athena shows them that the primordial, anti-civilizational terror they represent, which keeps them in the darknesses of earth, can be domesticated into the civilizing terror of respect for laws. Rather than shunned for their tribal bloodlust, they can be revered goddesses precisely for effecting the transition from a self-help justice-by-revenge to an administration of justice by trial, because reason is a surer guide than instinct and absolutely necessary if society is to be communal and democratic. The Furies transform into the Eumenides, the “Kindly Ones,” and Athena establishes a judicial principle: Defendants who receive an equally divided vote are to be acquitted. This type of compassion in the laws (recognizing manslaughter versus murder, for example), the argument goes, isn’t possible in a system only of competing families or tribes.
Can a political community have one definition of justice that will satisfy any and all grievances? Can the black and white character of most laws have the breadth to address current acts of injustice, while having the finality to end the debate over who deserves equity for past injustices—as Athena effectively did? Aeschylus shows Athenians that they had created democracy in the act of weighing the legitimate, competing claims made by different segments of society against each other, and by then arriving at the consensus, that the type of justice they needed to function as a coherent political community had to be more broadly built than those individual claims. The Eumenides in particular makes this exhortation, that democratic prosperity continues only so long as there remains a shared belief that a justice beyond the repayment of violence in kind is possible.
What makes the Oresteia so compelling a narrative for today’s America is that for decades we have actively worked backwards from the belief that such a thing as communal justice—justice for all, justice simply—is possible. While perhaps not intended, such is the message left in the dust of the new identity politics that emerged from the sexual revolution and an extravagant multiculturalism. In emphasizing the divisions of Americans into categories and subcategories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, each with its own (legitimate) grievances and hurts, academic lecturing has paved the way for the increasingly frequent physical convulsions of our cities. The goal of civil rights, in which individuals achieve equality under the law, is now consistently, startlingly rejected. Hence Baltimore last summer, in which (as the mayor put it) “those who wished to destroy” were given “space to do that.” Justice as the cycle of retribution might be “fair,” but it is something less than social and democratic.
A more recent compatriot of Aeschylus, George Seferis, said that the playwright “fought with his tragedies as if they were weapons that might keep his country free.” His Oresteia reminded Athenians of the violence they had escaped, of the progression of the bloody terror of the age of the Furies into the prosperous age of the “Kindly Ones” who protect justice through law. The Oresteia tells us the reverse today. The Eumenides have fled, and we have become infuriated.
Rebecca Burgess is program manager of the American Enterprise Institute Program on American Citizenship.
