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Comparing Aeschylus The Trial And Death Of Socrates

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In both the Aeschylus and The Trial and Death of Socrates the Greeks define a good death as a just death, and by the same token a good life was a just life. The two parental deaths in Aeschylus display one of each side. The murder of Agamemnon was the more permissible of the two, as Clytemnestra was not Agamemnon’s blood and was seeking her own justice. Her murder, however, is where the murkiness lies. She was also murdered in the name of vigilante justice, but by her own blood. This is an unforgivable injustice. In conveying the judicial struggle in defining that murder as just or unjust serves to show the Greeks understanding of the complicated nature of justice. It also conveys the belief that that which is just for one is not necessarily just for all. In the same way, a just action at one moment of a persons life is not unilaterally just. The Furies at one time were able to execute their unilateral justice in chasing down family killers, but in …show more content…

They are unjust because they were both done out of spite, without the pursuit of justice. A secondary just death would be the death of Socrates in the eyes of the Greek people. After giving him ample time to defend himself, and even allowing him a secondary vote, he still is found guilty by his peers. This speaks to the importance of a “good life” being good for the whole. The Greek people found him to be a corruptor of the minds of the young around him, however Socrates did not see himself that way. Socrates’s beliefs about death are also telling of the Greeks belief system. If it was true that “a good man cannot be harmed in life or in death” (Apology 42) than it is true that by acting justly through the legal system, they will do no harm to the “good man” that Socrates believes himself to be. These coupled together shows the continuous relationship between human and godly decisions set up in

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