Now, much of Athene’s speech addresses the ideals of the democratic polis. So the belief in ‘respect’, ‘justice’, ‘the laws’ leads in the remaining lines to a ringing denunciation of both anarchy and tyranny (words which closely echo the Furies’ own advice on justice, who had sung (525–6) ‘Praise neither the anarchic life nor life under a tyrant’, me¯t’anarkton bion me¯te despotoumenon ainese¯is). This polarization of lawlessness and tyranny constructs democracy as the necessary and proper middle ground. This is the counsel (bouleuo¯) of Athene, her official advice, that neither ‘respect’ (sebein, recalling sebas) nor ‘the awesome’ (to deinon, parallel to phobos, ‘fear’) – both terms are rendered as ‘fear’ by Harrison – should be cast from the polis, the frame of the speech. The explicit remark about innovation and the law, then, is surrounded by a repeated appeal to respect and dread as political virtues – the most general and non-partisan of evaluative terms (Dodds; Meier). Any specific point is thus framed by a general concern for the well-being of the city.
Athene’s emphasis here and elsewhere on national well-being and the avoidance of civic discord and wrong-doing makes it hard to discover a single ‘partisan’ political viewpoint with any security; so too the specific remarks on innovation, as we have seen, are open to different readings. Perhaps it is best, then, to conclude with Sommerstein that ‘each spectator will understand it in the light of his own preconceptions’. Or, as with the other aspects of Aeschylean poetry and drama that I have been discussing in this book, the political discourse of the Oresteia maps out a site of engagement, not a scene of straight-forward didacticism.
