The analysis of the historical and legal context of this dramatic production helps us to understand this reality and reinforces another one, the most important: the timelessness of the civilizational principles developed throughout this trilogy. It is not necessary, however, to view this attitude as the sign of a marked political ideology. On examining the competencies which Athena attributed to the court, it seems reasonable to suggest that Aeschylus was not wholly hostile to Ephialtes’ measures. He did this, however, with a clear objective in mind: to link the end of Orestes’ wanderings to the foundation of the Areopagus, the most esteemed of Athenian courts. The Eumenides is an Attic tragedy by Aeschylus, one of the most famous tragedians of classical Athens. These factors, allied with the demands of the dramatic phenomenon itself, led him to introduce new ways of dealing with the myth and to alter some historical and procedural details. Orestes’ trial in this court obliged Aeschylus to articulate very different realities: the legacy of myth and earlier literary tradition, as they referred to the saga of Orestes Attic constitutional history and the legal traditions current in the Athens of his own day and a consciousness of certain recent political measures, such as the reforms of Ephialtes and the murder of which he was a victim, hardly the norm for democratic standards.
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