PEACEFUL CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN AESCHYLUS’S EUMENIDES Edith Hall The igure of the Fury—the supernatural female who makes aggrieved humans transform their grief into acts of revenge against those they hold responsible—is one of our most enduring inheritances from Greek and Roman culture. Snaky- haired, dripping blood and phlegm, sometimes winged, always armed with whips, goads, and instruments of torture, the hideous Fury, or Erinys under her original Greek title, still haunts the world’s imagination. 1 The word Erinys is etymologically related to words meaning “anger” and “strife.” In ancient Greece, an Erinys in the singular, or Erinyes in the plural, could represent the interests of a murder victim and come almost to symbolize him or her in the land of the living, as revenant or unpaciied death spirits, thirsting for the blood of the murderer. The Erinyes who form the chorus of Aeschylus’s tragedy Eumenides describe this role in legal terms: they claim to be “upright witnesses [martures] for the dead” (line 318). 2 Common Knowledge 21:2 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2872367 © 2015 by Edith Hall 253 Symposium: Peace by Other Means, Part 3 1. See, for example, Edith Hall, “Narcissus and the Furies: Myth and Docuict ion in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,” in Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989, ed. Justine McConnell and Hall (London: Blooms- bury, 2015). 2. All parenthetical references here to the text of Eumen- ides refer to the universally accepted line numbers in the Greek original, as they appear in Alan H. Sommerstein, ed. and trans., Aeschylus, vol. II: Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). The translations from Greek pro- vided in this article are my own throughout.