Peaceful Conflict Resolution and Its Discontents in Aeschylus's Eumenides (original) (raw)

The figure of the Fury-the supernatural female who makes aggrieved humans transform their grief into acts of revenge against those they hold responsible-is one of our most enduring inheritances from Greek and Roman culture. Snakyhaired, dripping blood and phlegm, sometimes winged, always armed with whips, goads, and instruments of torture, the hideous Fury, or Erinys under her original Greek title, still haunts the world's imagination. 1 The word Erinys is etymologically related to words meaning "anger" and "strife." In ancient Greece, an Erinys in the singular, or Erinyes in the plural, could represent the interests of a murder victim and come almost to symbolize him or her in the land of the living, as revenant or unpacified death spirits, thirsting for the blood of the murderer. The Erinyes who form the chorus of Aeschylus's tragedy Eumenides describe this role in legal terms: they claim to be "upright witnesses [martures] for the dead" (line 318). 2