Forms of Justice in Aeschylus’ Eumenides

Metatheatre in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

Lionel Abel coined the word ‘metatheatre’ in his 1963 book, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, claiming he had discovered a new type of theatre, and cited Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the first metatheatrical play. Over the intervening decades, various scholars have pushed the incidence of the earliest metatheatrical play back beyond Hamlet. Richard Hornby, in his 1986 book, Drama, Metadrama,...

Sophrosyne in Aeschylus

political temperance and rational contrivance in the oresteia trilogy by aeschylus: reflecting on the problem of areopagus

the council of areopagus as a judicial establishment monitored the proper implementation of rule of law in the polis (city-state) of athens. while, the main responsibility and duty of areopagus was to adjudicate the cases of the most serious crimes, it intervened in the political affairs as well. eventually, after long-lasting political conflicts between athenian oligarchy and democracy, this e...

Legal Action: The Trial As Theater in Aeschylus' Oresteia

Aeschylus' Oresteia is a key text for analyzing the relationship between law and drama both because it includes the earliest surviving instance of a trial scene in western drama and because it is explicitly concerned with the nature of trials, telling a story of repeated conflict that can only be resolved by the invention of the trial as a new form of action. First produced in Athens in 458 B.C...

Justice in the City of God

The “City of God” as the most prominent work of St. Augustine can be considered a good link between the Christian and Greek philosophical tradition.  He argues that the purpose of human Justice, surrendering to order, can be considered relatively a type of human justice.  St. Augustine, like many of the philosophers before him, stress that the ultimate goal of Peace for the human being is the u...