Please use the following questions as a jumping off point to discuss the final play in Aeschlyus’s Oresteia. In this play we see the founding of Athens through the creation of a tribunal to settle disputes. The tribunal inaugurates a new type of political community, one that facilitates and is sustained by a new form of political relationship.When you create your post, be sure to copy and paste the question – INCLUDING THE QUESTION NUMBER – as the first line in your post.What do the Eumenides represent? They might have meaning on multiple levels. Please pick one and develop it.The Eumenides claim that the fear they strike in people’s hearts underwrites all law. They say that the younger gods get their authority from them. Are they right? If so, in what sense?What is the difference between Apollo’s response to the Eumenides and Athena’s? Why does Athena react differently and how does this difference make her the right deity to preside over the trial?What do Apollo and the Furies represent in relation to one another? What tension inherent to human society is Aeschylus dramatizing through their conflict over Orestes’ fate?What role does Athena give to the Eumenides after the jury trial establishes Athens? Why does she give them this honored place? What does the shift in their role say about Aeschylus’s understanding of one of the central challenges of establishing a political society?The power of speech is a central theme in The Oresteia. How does the final play fulfill the potential of speech as the basis of political society? What problems does it resolve? What problems does it warn us about?What are the advantages of the new kind of justice established in the final play The Furies (Eumenides)? To what degree does it resolve the problems of blood right and guest right?
