Great, towering ideals run through the history of civilized society; grand threads entwined in every age of mankind. These ideals, which reside in the analytical realm of philosophy and the humanities, are abundant: truth, order, freedom, perfection, virtue, and morality. Justice is another of these threads which has consumed, perhaps haunted, the thoughts of sages and philosophers, and indeed to illustrate their preoccupation with this theme, one needs only to note the abundance of books and treatises focusingon this topic: Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Among the earliest literary works dealing with justice is Aeschylus's The Oresteia. In this trilogy of Greek tragedies, written in 458 BC, justice-in many different forms-fuels the plot line as character after character confronts transgression and seeks out justice (most often in the form of retribution). The purpose of this paper is to analyze, through a comparison of ancient Greek and modern notions, the early Greek conception of justice as portrayed by Aeschylus in The Oresteia.
Justice is such a broad, overarching conception so acutely sensitive to individual interpretation that a single definition of what justice means to any society is extremely difficult, and this difficulty is further compounded by the fact that within society each individual's conception of justice is distinct. Furthermore, the individual oft finds justice contextually inconsistent; that is to say that frequently the individual's concept of justice is not absolutely concrete but contingent upon the particular circumstances of the situation. As a result of these inconsistencies before attempting to interpret the meaning of justice to an ancient, foreign society we would do well to first explore our own modern ideas regarding this topic. Therefore, before analyzing Aeschylus's conception of justice in The Oresteia we shall attempt to define justice and the structure of justice through our own modern perceptions and experiences.
The Cambridge Dictionary gives two definitions of justice: “fairness in the way people are dealt with” and “the system of laws in a country which judges and punishes people.” These two definitions seem intuitive, for throughout much of history justice has been dissected into two competing notions: legality and fairness. We as civilized human-beings certainly comprehend the legality aspect of this concept, for since the Enlightenment individuals have been consciously aware that the continuance of society requires the adherence to law and the sacrifice of certain individual liberties. Locke in Of Civil Government wrote:
But because no political society can exist without having the power to preserve the property and also punish the offenses of all those of that society, there and there only is a political society where every one of the members has given up his natural power, surrendering it into the hands of the community…And thus, all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpired by settled standing rules, impartial and the same to all parties, and by men having authority from the community for the execution of those rules. (72)
Hence, we recognize that there exists law and that when we break the law certain pre-prescribed consequences follow. As a result justice in the legal sense is the administration of appropriate and due punishment, and we inherently realize that this administration of justice is necessary for the survival of civilization.
Inscribed on the exterior of the United States Department of Justice Building in Washington, DC, is a line from Plato. This text reads, “Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” As Plato suggests in this quotation, in addition to legality our conception of justice includes another notion which we will designate fairness. Earlier the claim was made that justice being “acutely sensitive to individual interpretation” was difficult to define. Indeed if justice originates from the inner workings of the mortal-“the hearts and souls of the citizens”-then justice must be highly individualistic, and moreover since legality is socially prescribed this individualism must be a direct consequence of fairness being a highly personal, abstract conviction. The point is that we would, if asked, say that fairness requires a differentiation between right and wrong. However, if then asked the difference between right and wrong we would not be able to continue the conversation without moving into the realm of personal belief. Hence, the determination can be made that fairness in connection with justice involves doing right and is contingent upon the individual's sense of good and bad, right and wrong.
The concepts of fairness and legality are strongly echoed in Carol Gilligan's writings on psychological development, and in order to provide a clearer definition of these two branches of justice we will pause for a short examination of Gilligan's work. In her book In a Different Voice she suggests that the individual in the process of cognitive development adopts either a categorical or contextual mode of thinking and that these two methods of thinking eventually become integrated into a dialectic method of cognizance. Gilligan identifies the categorical method of thinking through a description of boys at play:
