SOURCE: Roth, Marty. “The Blood that Fury Breathed: The Shape of Justice in Aeschylus and Shakespeare.” Comparative Literature Studies 29, no. 2 (1992): 141-56.

In the following essay, Roth remarks on the parallels between Aeschylus's Eumenides and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, with special reference to their depictions of the conflict between old and new orders of revenge and justice.

Two thousand years before Portia appealed to the “Jew” for mercy and then defeated him, the maiden Athena convened the world's first court of justice. She stood between Orestes and the Erinyes, who were, like Shylock, doggedly bent on revenge. She too made an appeal to sweet “Persuasion.” Aeschylus' Eumenides (458 B.C.) is a play about justice, but instead of the static dimension of rights and wrongs it is worked out in dark and vivid shapes: heavy breathing, tension in the jaw and fingers, an aching to bite and tear.

The...