Justice and Godliness in Euripides’ Suppliant Women

Abstract

Given that the matter of justice is the guiding thread of Euripidean tragedies and that the plot (understood as 'the combination of facts', sýnthesin tôn pragmáton, Aristotle, Poet.1450a4-5) is a diegetic image of the mythical notion of Justice, the part-by-part reading of the tragedy Suppliant Women by Euripides shows that - named or not - Justice, daughter of Zeus, manifests herself in the temporal horizon of the course of events, punishing transgressions and wickedness of mortals. If Justice is divine for being one of the fundamental aspects of the world, godliness lies in the decisions and attitudes of mortals, which make them grateful to the immortal Gods. The punishment of the Gods to mortals tends to be collective before being individual, whereas the grace of the Gods to mortals tends to be individual before being collective.