Gendered justice: Tragedy and the revision of the feminine

Abstract

Athens had grown too rich, too powerful, and too politically astute to allow a primitive, apolitical form of justice to prevail. Revenge and retribution had to be transformed into a form of conflict resolution that was suitable to a sophisticated polis. How Aeschylus has Athena proceed with this transformation reinforces the feminine principle of reconciling reason. The enemy of reconciliation is not merely a desire for justice-asrevenge-and-retribution. The enemy of reconciliation is an absence of political spacetime. We have already seen how the trial creates space-time between an infraction and its punishment. In the transformation of the Furies, Aeschylus illustrates this process more fundamentally. At the level of speech, Aeschylus realizes that words can be just as implacable as revenge and retribution. Words by themselves do not create political or juridical space-time. They have to be open or have to be opened to reason.