Eumenides

Whereas the justice explored in the previous plays of the Oresteia (Agamemnon and Libation Bearers) is largely retributive, Eumenides moves toward a legal notion of justice and social order. The retributive impulse that characterizes Agamemnon and Libation Bearers—returning wrong for wrong and violence for violence—is given a physical manifestation in the Furies, who pursue Orestes for the pollution he incurred through his crime of matricide. The Furies view themselves as “straight and just” (312), and indeed they do represent an eye-for-an-eye notion of fairness. But the ugliness of the Furies, so strongly emphasized in the play and possibly a detail invented by Aeschylus, suggests that the retributive vengeance embodied by the Furies is ugly and outdated. To Apollo, the Furies actually represent malevolence, rather than true justice:

It was because of evil they were born, because

They hold the evil darkness of the Pit below

Earth, loathed alike by men and by the heavenly gods (71-73).

The Furies derive their authority from “powers gray with age” (150), “privilege / Primeval” (393-94)—from “established laws” (491) of a pre-civilized age. The justice of the Furies is therefore very old. The alternative to this kind of redress is represented by the newer gods Apollo and