Trial A History, From Socrates OT O.J. Simpson

Chapter One From Eden to Ordeals It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by that name; in fact it is a permanent court-martial. - Franz Kafka, Aphorisms One of the few things that humanity has agreed upon for most of history is that its laws descend directly from the gods. The oldest complete legal code yet discovered, inscribed onto a black cone by the Babylonians almost four thousand years ago, shows Shamash, god of the sun, enthroned and handing down his edicts to a reverential King Hammurabi. Jehovah reportedly did much the same thing a few centuries later, carving ten commandments onto two tablets with His own finger as Moses stood by on fiery Mount Sinai. Coincidentally or otherwise, it was said of Crete's King Minos that he climbed Mount Olympus every nine years to receive legal advice from Zeus. Ancient cultures were equally certain that the power to adjudicate breaches of the law rested ultimately in the hands of the gods. The methods of enforcement were often as terrible as they were mysteriousranging from bolts of lightning to visitations of boilsbut the justice of the punishments was as unquestionable as the law that they honored. And yet, for all the insistence that heavenly laws were cast in stone and divine judgments unerring, one question always caused turmoilnamely, to whom, down on earth, had the right to judge been delegated? The priests who veiled their various scrolls and statutes invariably argued that only they could interpret their secrets, backing up the claim with further revelations as and when required. Monarchs were no less assertive, and constantly sought to interfere with the religious mysteries of justice. Some even argued that the power lay elsewhere. Among the Hebrews, for example, an old tradition prescribed that homicides should be tried by common people, and although Judah's priests established something close to a theocracy after 722 b.c., their oldest myth of all characterized the ability to tell good from evil as every human being's birthright. The story of the Fall was not, admittedly, a ringing endorsement of the power to judgeAdam and Eve had, after all, paid for their apple with sorrow, sweat, and deathbut it was certainly a start. The Athenians would produce a considerably more robust illustration of humanity's inherent sense of justice: Aeschylus' Oresteia, the oldest known courtroom drama in history. The trilogy, first performed in 458 b.c., retells the ancient myth of Orestes, scion of the royal house of Atreusa bloodline as polluted as any that has managed to perpetuate itself on this earth. The corruption had set in when its founding father, Tantalus, chose, for imponderably mythic reasons, to slaughter his son, boil the body, and serve it up as soup to the gods. Aggrieved Olympians condemned him to an eternity of tantalization, food and drink forever just out of reach, and resolved to visit folly, blindness, and pride on his offspring forevermore. Family fortunes began a rapid decline, and by the time that Tantalus' great-great-grandson Orestes reached adulthood, its history of rape, incest, cannibalism, and murder had generated a degree of domestic dysfunction that was pathological even by the standards of Greek mythology. The play opens with news that Agamemnon, commander of the Greek armies and father of Orestes, has just triumphed at the Trojan Wars. But all is not well. Victory was purchased through the sacrifice of his own daughter, Iphigenia, and he has abducted Cassandra, the beautiful child of Troy's King Priam, to have as his concubine. His wife, Clytemnestra, has meanwhile taken a lover of her own and sworn to avenge IphigeniKadri, Sadakat is the author of 'Trial A History, From Socrates OT O.J. Simpson' with ISBN 9780375757037 and ISBN 0375757031.