The Flies By Sophocles: A Character Analysis

Prompt for the Final Essay
PHI118 Examined Life

1. At the end of the final play of his trilogy (The Eumenides), Aeschylus has Athena make the following two points to Orestes, the Furies, and the people of Athens:
a. “I open on this rock [the Areopagus opposite the Acropolis] the pure springs of my laws. Do not taint them by an expedient shift for advantages. Protect this court which will protect you all from the headstrong license of any man’s will and from slavery. Above all, remember the power of fear and cherish it in your ministry of the laws… I give you this court and I bless it— Like heaven, not to be violated. Like heaven, holy.”
b. In response to the Furies outcry against the verdict she says, “You call for justice. But God speaks through me. Only I, Pallas Athene, possess the key that unlocks the thunderbolt of Zeus. But the time for brute

Sartre, in his play, the Flies, has this confrontation between Zeus and Orestes: Zeus: “Orestes, I created you, and I created all things…. For the world is good; I made it according to my will, and I am Goodness… Return to Nature, Nature’s thankless son. Know your sin, abhor it, and tear it from you as one tears out a rotten noisome tooth…. Come back to the fold. Think of your loneliness; even your sister is forsaking you. Your eyes are big with anguish, your face pale and drawn. The disease you’re suffering from is inhuman, foreign to my nature, foreign to yourself. Come back. I am forgiveness, I am peace.” Orestes, however, responds as follows: “Foreign to myself—I know it. Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself. But I shall not return under your law; I am doomed to have no other law but mine. Nor shall I come back to nature, the nature you found good; in it are a thousand beaten paths all leading up to you—but I must blaze my trail. For I, Zeus, am a man, and every man must find out his own way. Nature abhors man, and you too, god of gods, abhor