Abstract
The last lesson of the year offers some interim conclusions, since the theme of religious norms and questions of authority is far from exhausted. After summarizing what we've learned over the weeks about the semantic fields of hieros, themis (with thesmos) and nomos, we turn to Aeschylus' tragedy of the norm par excellence, The Eumenides. Presented in Athens in 458, theOresteia trilogy, of which Les Euménides is the third part, depicts the chain of murders that bloody the palace of Mycenae as soon as King Agamemnon returns from the fall of Troy. Orestes avenges his father's murder by killing his own mother and her lover. Pursued by the vengeful Erinyes, but supported by the Delphic Apollo, Orestes travels to Athens, where Athena founds the Areopagus tribunal to judge him. The verdict absolves the young man, and the Erinyes are transformed into benevolent goddesses for Athens, where they now have a place. Woven from the interweaving of thesmos and nomos discussed above, the tragedy bears little witness to a human order that has replaced a divine one, but rather to the importance of the notions of distribution and honor, in the dual sense of the timê that men owe to the gods and the timê that the gods bestow on men. This " contract " implicit in every polis will become even clearer with the introduction of other semantic fields that we'll be tackling next year.
