Justice: Legality and Fairness in Aeschylus
Justice was a critical theme in the Oresteia, and this paper seeks to explore this sense of justice. Along with justice in our modern society.
Great, towering ideals run through the history of civilized society; grand threads entwined in every age of mankind. These ideals, which reside in the analytical realm of philosophy and the humanities, are abundant: truth, order, freedom, perfection, virtue, and morality. Justice is another of these threads which has consumed, perhaps haunted, the thoughts of sages and philosophers, and indeed to illustrate their preoccupation with this theme, one needs only to note the abundance of books and treatises focusingon this topic: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Among the earliest literary works dealing with justice is Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. In this trilogy of Greek tragedies, written in 458 BC, justice-in many different forms-fuels the plot line as character after character confronts transgression and seeks out justice (most often in the form of retribution). The purpose of this paper is to analyze, through a comparison of ancient Greek and modern notions, the early Greek conception of justice as portrayed by Aeschylus in The Oresteia.
Justice is such a broad, overarching conception so acutely sensitive to individual interpretation that a single definition of what justice means to any society is extremely difficult, and this difficulty is further compounded by the fact that within society each individual’s conception of justice is distinct. Furthermore, the individual oft finds justice contextually inconsistent; that is to say that frequently the individual’s concept of justice is not absolutely concrete but contingent upon the particular circumstances of the situation. As a result of these inconsistencies before attempting to interpret the meaning of justice to an ancient, foreign society we would do well to first explore our own modern ideas regarding this topic. Therefore, before analyzing Aeschylus’s conception of justice in The Oresteia we shall attempt to define justice and the structure of justice through our own modern perceptions and experiences.
The Cambridge Dictionary gives two definitions of justice: “fairness in the way people are dealt with” and “the system of laws in a country which judges and punishes people.” These two definitions seem intuitive, for throughout much of history justice has been dissected into two competing notions: legality and fairness. We as civilized human-beings certainly comprehend the legality aspect of this concept, for since the Enlightenment individuals have been consciously aware that the continuance of society requires the adherence to law and the sacrifice of certain individual liberties. Locke in Of Civil Government wrote:
Liked it
