Greek Tragedies, Real Life and All that Jazz

First off, I think I should start off with an apology. This is unfortunately going to be a serious post. Yes, I do realize that serious posts are rather boring but I beg you to bear with me and even skip this entry if necessary, in order to conserve your sanity.

That brings me to the point of this post. I've been writing an essay for English Literature which focuses on the theme of justice in the first part of the The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus (btw, how does one pronounce Aeschylus?) and its got me thinking (which is something quite rare, so you can image how much of a big impact this must have made on me!). From the play Agamemnon, it can be seen that there is a lot of prominence is placed on the difference between the duty of a person towards his home and towards his city in Greek society. Agamemnon is in a conflict between his duty towards his home and that towards his city when he is given a choice between his daughter and participation in the war. The climax of the play occurs when Clytemnestra (Agamemnon's wife) kills Agamemnon, acting in accordance with the laws of justice. She claims that Agamemnon’s murder is an act of justice but alternatively she also does it for revenge beacause of the murder of her daughter. So basically, to put it simply, revenge is justice in Ancient Greek society and this idea creates a lot fundamental problems, as can be seen in The Eumenides, which is the third part of The Oresteian Trilogy.

Now what I find really surprising is that issues such as the conflict between need for taking personal revenge and the public system of justice that Aeschylus wrote about in 512 BC in The Eumenides that Athena eventually establishes are all pretty pertinent to our society in the 21st century. This whole concept of why you just cant just randomly kill someone who has killed someone close to you, but instead the murderer goes on trial in front of a jury and has a chance to defend himself is what every judicial system in the world is based on. Now this really shows the level of human development from 512 BC. When we look at society then and the society now, really what has changed? Well, obviously, you can say that there has been a lot of technological and teleological developments in the world but the crux of the matter is that the emotional problems or the dilemmas that humans faced more than 2000 years ago still remain the same. It seems to me from the above argument that there has actually not been any emotional development in man as time has passed.

Again, I'm not looking for any comments to this post, it was just a random thought that was going on in my head as I was doing my English essay, although if someone does have anything constructive to say, either to agree or to disagree with my opinions, I would be delighted to read them and I do promise something lighter for my next post, definately nothing on Greek Tragedies this time.