Mat 540

Life and human fortune was very instable in Mesopotamians’ eyes. People just observed death and afterlife from a distance and some made them into a series of myths. For instance, “The Epic of Gilgamesh” expresses its idea on eventual death. No matter how hard Gilgamesh tries to lengthen his life, his death is predestined. The Mesopotamians viewed afterlife as an inevitable end.

In Aeschylus' trilogy, the Greeks' justice system went through a transformation from old to new ways. In the beginning of the trilogy, the characters settle their matters, both personal and professional, with vengeance. Vengeance is when someone is harmed or killed, and either the victim, or someone close to them takes revenge on the criminal. This matter is proven in the trilogy numerous times.

The epic gives insight to the ways in which ancient Mesopotamians valued life. This becomes most obvious when Enkidu reveals to Gilgamesh his nightmare of the dark and enslaving afterlife as he is dying (The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2). This leaves Gilgamesh with extreme terror of death which provokes his desperate attempts to escape it. Giving death fearful and dark characteristics communicates that the afterlife is a harrowing experience and life is the individual’s harmonious experience. This serves to establish that ancient Mesopotamians sensed that life was something to be cherished and conceived of in a positive light. In addition, Mesopotamian life views are also illustrated when Gilgamesh must accept that he will not receive his requests for immortality from the gods (The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2). This suggests Mesopotamian society believed wise men should be grateful for their destiny and that he or she should not reach beyond what they are given. In doing so, this

Have you ever acted out in retribution for something done to you? Some examples could be if you punched someone for intentionally kicking you, or if someone deliberately hurt the feelings of someone you love and you retaliated in kind. You probably thought the punishment you received for your actions was too harsh or lenient. Many factors went into the decision of what discipline you received for this act and some were fair while others probably were not. This is true for the actions of many people in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In each of the three plays, someone is seeking vengeance for a wrong done unto them, someone they know/love, or both. For this paper, I will be focusing on the vengeance enacted by Clytemnestra, Orestes, and the Fates. The vengeance that each person enacted was deemed just or unjust depending on many factors including the people who were doing the judging. Vengeance in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is viewed through the social lens of the society that it was enacted in. This lens is made up of the popular values, beliefs, and social conventions of the period as well as the judge’s personal views and/or experiences. These factors (such as gender and relation to the victim, as well as the presence or absence of transgressions on the characters part) lead to different opinions about the guilt of the accused individual and the individual themselves. The view of vengeance in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is very subjective.

Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The real question of life after death isn 't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.” The idea that death is inevitable is well known by everyone, yet no one is certain as to what happens afterwards. Even though the subject of life after death has been argued for centuries by many philosophers and theologians. In the article Sign Here If You Exist, Jill Sisson Quinn adequately employs figurative language, rhetoric questionings, and personal anecdotes to demonstrate a controversial argument on the topic of life after death.

Everyone is going to die. This is no secret to the audience of the Greek play Agamemnon. Rather than surprising us with the murders that befall at the hands of vengeance, the Greek playwright uses this common story to display the underlying theme that one must first suffer before they can reach the truth. To understand the significance behind the story of Agamemnon, one must understand the passions and how they relate to the human person, Zeus’s law of suffering into truth, and Aeschylus’s motives for writing Agamemnon and how he reflects Catholic teaching.

Agamemnon is the first book in the Orestiean Trilogy written by the famous Greek tragedy writer, Aeschylus. Agamemnon is a story of justice and revenge. The story takes place in a city called Argos. It starts with Agamemnon, the king of Argos, away at the Trojan War. The city is eagerly awaiting the news of their king’s welfare and the outcome of the war. Watchmen are posted in the city, watching for the beacon that would report the capture of Troy and Agamemnon’s return. Beacons are set up from Troy to Argos; when one beacon is lit, the next one will be lit, until the last. The play starts when a palace watchman discovers the beacon and tells Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, the good news.

For the Mesopotamians view of the afterlife was not always a good thing. Mesopotamians did not live a long life they would die at a young age due to the sickness that thee had back then. Mesopotamia is a place that the Mesopotamians believed to be between two rivers. Mesopotamia first got started through a poems and myths that the ancestors told. They also believed that everything has a personality. The Mesopotamians believed that the afterlife death was a descent of the underworld believed to be ruled by the god Nergal. They lived bad lives and their idea about the afterlife resemble the hardness that they will have to face during their present life. They will ¨wasted no times¨ preparing for the afterlife. This is what usually happens to

Even though Agamemnon made a success for his homecoming, what was waiting for him was her wife’s conspiracy with Aegisthus and his death (262-263). Namely, his nosmos was rather a failure and he also faced fate of his failed household. This Agamemnon’s gives a comparison with Odysseus future success for preserving his family and throne. Furthermore, Clytemnestra’s unfaithfulness and infidelity provides a foil to Penelope’s faithfulness and loyalty. Clytemnestra’s merciless and brutal actions, not sealing Agamemnon’s eyes while he was dying, adds contrasting characteristics between Odysseus and Agamemnon’s wives. Note that here, the story of successful vengeance for Agamemnon by Orestes gives a foil to Telemachus’ weakness and deficiency. Orestes here is depicted as a heroic example with murder of Aegistus after he comes of age (264). On the contrary to Orestes who saved his household and restored order in his family’s kingdom, Telemachus, as he came of age, couldn’t serve as protecting his household and repel his mother’s suitors in the absence of his father. In the light of comparing each heroic figures’ sons, the son of Achilles is also depicted as successful warrior with great strength and fame in the battlefield against Trojan, adding a foil to Telemachus’ unsuccessful position as a son (266).

Just as humanity has always seen itself as “an orphan bereft of family”, Mesopotamians believed that humanity differed from animals and the supernatural and could not be placed into either of those classifications (Harari 11). Humans were granted more knowledge than animals and the ability to understand the world around them, but for some aspects, were unable to do anything about it. As Benjamin Foster writes in his “The Person in Mesopotamian Thought”, “human beings unlike animals [had to] learn to live with the advance knowledge that they will die, though without knowing when or how” (Foster 118). Gods and demons, on the other hand, were incapable of dying, but animals were unaware of their inevitable deaths. However, the reconciliation of that inevitability was not always easy for humans. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh tries to find a fountain of youth following the death of his best friend, Enkidu, but was unsuccessful as it did not exist for mortals. Unlike animals and demons, humans were expected to live with justice (Foster 118). Nature does not exhibit justice, as biologically, organisms are not endowed with rights like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness (Harari 97).

Religion has also played a major role in Mesopotamian culture throughout history. Early religion in Mesopotamia was polytheistic for the majority. They believed that different gods controlled the various forces of nature. Ancient mesopotamia consisted over 2100 different deities that were associated with different city-states within. Ancient sumerian culture believed that afterlife was a land below our world that everyone went to regardless of social status or the actions performed during life. Around the 1st century CE,

Who am I? What is the meaning of life? What happens after death? Since the beginning of time, humans have pondered these and other grand questions of life. Some of the most significant attempts at explaining life were undertaken by philosophers in ancient Greece during the 6th century BCE. Two key figures contributing to Greek philosophy were Socrates and Aristotle who both developed fundamental ideals: idealism and materialism. Socrates explained through idealist logic that the truth of life is relative to each individual’s ideas and reasoning, while Aristotle believed through materialism that life is

Reading through three related stories, we discover different motifs denoting author’s thought in different time.Without any doubt, the tragic essence goes through the Three Theban Plays. As Sophocles meditates the philosophy of the tragedy all along his life, the tragic essence expands from individuals in a society. The conflict in each play becomes increasingly complicated. In Antigone, we can clearly distinguish the conflict between Antigone and Creon, family and politics. However, in Oedipus at Colonus, the play merges all the conflicts happened to former plays and enhances the theme of the story. The later part of this trilogy, especially the ending of Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, reveals a darker and deeper phenomenon of Thebes and projects it to Oedipus. The prophet plays important role of forming the story line and tragic image of Oedipus, but the root causing the series of tragedy of the characters is not gods’ command. It is degeneration of people, which is pathetic to humanity. Finally, after suffering from family complex and exile, Oedipus is not only a victim of the society, but also the reflection of the twisted humanity of Thebes.

Virgil was Rome’s unwilling epic poet, he gave the Roman people a cohesive narrative that tied them to the past and propelled them towards the future. This narrative, The Aeneid, had its basis in local lore as well as ties to the older Greek epics of Homer. The Aeneid almost functions as an extension of The Iliad and Odyssey, with its protagonist, Aeneas, being a minor figure in the earlier poems, and the work itself academically divided into “Odyssean” and “Iliadic” parts. In this relationship Virgil owes a creative debt to Homer, and there is a resemblance that can be seen with striking clarity when the experiences of Homers’ Odysseus and Virgil’s Aeneas are examined side by side. Odysseus and Aeneas are both honour bound to reach the destinations of their respective journeys, Odysseus to rule Ithaca and Aeneas to found Rome, and while ones journey often mirrors the others, there are significant differences between the two. The major differences that can be observed lie in their characters and forms of heroism and these variations shape the course of their narratives, yet the similarities of their internal journeys and ultimate fates remain intact.

The first play, Agamemnon, tells about the return of the King from the Trojan wars and how his wife has chosen to react to the reunion. Clytemnestra is the queen who was angered by the fact that Agamemnon was away for a decade and that the King sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to one of the gods. In one part of the play, the Chorus of Elders chants "Zeus who hath paved a way for human thought, by ordaining this firm law 'He who learns, suffers'" (Aeschylus, trans. 1893, 1.176-179) which speaks to the law that was formed by the words. The people of Greece followed the law that a person who commits a crime, whether that be a recognized law or one that the punisher deemed appropriate, is subject to some form of punishment. In Agamemnon's case, Clytemnestra believed that his actions justified his death. She did not believe that it was murder because his actions justified her actions.