As we're watching this play, we ancient
Athenians, Sitting in our theater, staring down at
what's happening, The action that's happening on the stage.
We can also see, looming up above us, one of the main features of what the play is
supposed to be all about. There's the Acropolis right there, and it
is magnificent to see. This in an old pre-copyright photo.
It is magnificent to see and if you and I are out in this, in the, in the theater of
ancient Athens and we're actually very close.
We can see, right up above behind us,, The court that's being talked about in
Aeschylus' place. So, what's being, the location of the
performance is being set on stage. But the stage setting is not more than,,
is, is a very short distance away,uh from the court itself, which you and I have in
our own eyesight. And at the end of the play, when the
Furies get marched underneath the Acropolis and put into a temple,uh right
underneath the Earth,uh they could've marched right off the stage and gone right
down there. We would've been able to see it, as those
that were viewing the play. So, it, it's very much what we're seeing,
it's very much embedded in the surroundings, the actual physical
surroundings of the play as it's being performed in the Athens.
It's also referring to important themes that are emerging in classical Athens.
Remember, this is the birthplace of democracy.
New, new system of, of rule is being instituted here.
And when Aeschylus's play is first being performed in 458,uh the institutions of
democracy were not many decades old. It was back in the year 510 B.C.
When a group of people that were known as the tyrants,uh were eventually kicked
out.uh Nowadays, the English term tyrant mostly is synonymous with a terrible
leader. Then, it was a one man one rule kind of
indicator. Some of these were worse than others,
But the tyrants were these one man one rule kind of system,uh system and, and,
for many, for centuries, they had ruled ancient Athens with the advent of
democracy, they're kicked out and the new system is put into place.,
This new system has obvious strengths to it.
I don't need to rehearse the benefits of having a democratic system of justice, a
democratic system of society. These are the, the, the, the goodness of
the system is constantly being tested over history and that's, of course, the right
kind of thing and, presumably, democracy has its own arguments to justify itself.
But it's surely at the time it's forming in ancient Athens a new form of ways of
doing things, and it needs to have a kind of argument built into the play for it,
and we can see in Aeschylus' treatment of this new system of justice,uh a reference
to what's happening, happening in the democratic society around him.
Remember, Athena at line 696, endorses this new form, she talks about no anarchy,
no rule of a single master. Thus,thus I advise my citizens to govern.
So, she jumps right in and says it's, it's time for just the citizens to be
governing, governing and part of governing is going to be taking over questions of
justice in a citizenry-based place of arbitration.
So, we're going to remove what had been the purview of these ancient beasts,
The Furies following the blood and attacking and counterattacking and
revenge. We remove move that away and put it into a
court of justice that's run by a group of people like you and I.
Now, in order to talk about the virtues of this way of making things work and
Aeschylus surely does that. We also have to understand some of what
was different about this system and a new and different things there's always some
sort of thread. The old order, for example, had a strong
basis in traditional ties, Ties of family and clan were what were
thought to be most important. Well now,
The law, the state, the city,uh A new institution in the previous decades before
Aeschylus was working on a, a complicated network of voting districts. These were
things that started to claim people's allegiance and sometimes, these would run
parallel to family interests, Sometimes they would run at,
cross-purposes to what family interests are. The old system, in other words, had
certain kinds of benefits. It was based on a tradition of family ties
that was clear, It was easy to understand.
All of us would endorse family ties as being an important thing.
So it seemed as though things,uh in moving to this new system of justice, we're going
to have to give some things up. In order to try to get a grip on what that
is, I thought I'd just thought I'd just toss out a experiment for you, two
possibilities. Imagine that there is a, a situation where
a son does something wrong. A father comes in and punishes the son.uh
Just thinking myself to my own situation. If my father came along and decided that
he wanted to punish me, well, I would kind of just have to take it.
I would have to sit back and say, well, you know, here's my father punishing me,
this is what dad's do and I might disagree.
I might say, this, of course, dad's got it wrong.
I, I didn't understand the whole context. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll try to state my
case later, but I know I'm getting punished now.
I might think the, I might think that the father is wrong,
But I'm never going to say, This father has no right to punish me, his
son. Of course, a father has a right to punish
his son. That, that just goes with the territory.
That's kind of built in to the order of things.um Again, I might disagree with
what's happening, I might resist, I might struggle, I might toss up my hands, but in
the end, I kind of know that this is something that I just sort of understand,
it's just way things are. Fathers have the right to punish sons.
Now imagine, if I've done something that's a little sketchy, a little wrong, and I'm
walking past some stranger and the stranger says to me, you've done something
bad. Let's say I, I jaywalked across the street
and the stranger comes up to me and says, now I'm going to punish you, and starts to
give you a punishment. What right does a stranger have to punish
you? Now, if your father wanted to punish you
for jaywalking across the street, you just have to take it.
The stranger wanting to punish you for jaywalking across the street.
Who are you to get involved in my business? You don't understand anything
about me. I don't owe anything to you.
You're just a person just like me. What's your position of authority for you
to be in a position of punishing me? Now, imagine that our thought experiment
moves away from issues of not all that much consequence where you get things that
are socially awkward happening. Imagine that it moves into a venue where
the thing that's being punished is something of great consequence and great
import, for example, a murder and imagine that the punishment is hugely
consequential and may result in the depriving of a person of their fortune, of
their family, their family fortune. May the, involvement of, depriving them of
their freedom, to lock them up for years and years.
Could be even to depriving them of their own life, they could get a punishment that
takes their own life. Now, you're going to have to take this new
system in which strangers, Who are your peers, all the sudden have
the power to mete out justice and you have to say, huh, do I trust people I've never
met, total strangers to me, who are just like me, to now judge an issue, judgement
against me that has real teeth, that could do horrible things to me in my own
personal future. Would I rather have those kind of
situations being decided within my own family,
Where people know me, they know my strengths, they know my weaknesses, they
surely know what contexts there are. They're going to give me the benefit of
the doubt the best they can. They have a long term connection with me.
Wouldn't I want them to decide what the appropriate punishment is for me rather
than some stranger? It's surely the case that we would want
that to happen because we would think that we would get off easier, but it could also
be that even correcting for that just to say, yeah, I'd rather get off easy for the
crime I know I committed. I think that most of us would at least
agree that there's some help and having people that know you well trying to make a
judgement about you, rather than having strangers make a judgement about you.
So this new system has to figure out a way to justify itself to a group of people who
may be uncomfortable being judged and punished by their peers,
Strangers, who are their peers. As opposed to people they're use to having
connections with. Now, in this new system there's no blood
relation, we've got abstractions, we have now a law that we're supposed to follow
and we have, peers and strangers who are meting out the authority.
Aeschylus chooses to dramatize the Oresteia using this as a new kind of
justice, the system that I've just described.
It's not at all obvious that someone has to tell the Oresten story this way.
Aeschylus makes it go in this direction and he makes it a story that overall is
about the proper way of meting out justice.
This old crime that the old system had no way of solving, it turned into a cycle of
retribution out of which there was no escape.
The house of Atreus famously turning in on itself by this old system of justice.
Aeschylus moves in and says, ancient Athens, you contemporary people watching
this play, you have created a system that's going to be able to solve this most
knotty of all problems. And, in fact, this is what happens in the
play. The climatic moment is when this court
comes to a decision that counts as being just those in the audience, presumably
think, yeah, there's some kind of justice being done here.
You and I might disagree over the details of the argumentation,
Some of them are things that, that contemporary observers of Aeschylus' drama
are not going to with. But we've got a system that's being sewn
up. And if we're classical Athenians, at
least, our watching this saying to ourselves.
You know, there is some promise to this new system.
It can even solve this old crime or this old question of justice.
Even more important, it takes the old system of justice based on the Furies and
blood, and it gives them a new role. It builds a temple for them, puts them
underneath in the cathonic area, as the kind of business and of this now human,
this human court centered at the Areopagus. It now becomes a kind of harsh
side, It's the violence behind what courts have
a capacity to do. It now becomes institutionalized,
Violence, thoroughly controlled and regulated by human institution.
All of this in the end is authorized by Apollo and Athena.
The Olympian gods are overseeing the whole process.
And you and I as Athenians get to watch our court being shaped before our own eyes
and having it solved something that even mythic times people were not wise enough
to solve.