Democratic Inclusion and “Suffering Together” in The Eumenides

Abstract

Drawing upon the dual status of the Eumenides as metics who were neither included in nor excluded from Athenian democratic politics, this essay attempts to bring the last scene of The Eumenides to contemporary political settings wherein we observe the duality of immigrants—that is, the tension between political citizenship and cultural foreignness—in our liberal society. The controversial bride kidnapping cases among Hmong immigrants show that the liberal regulative principles such as reciprocity and mutual respect cannot work in the context of powerful and irreconcilable cultural and moral conflicts, which go beyond the line that we can tolerate in the name of cultural diversity. Instead, this essay focuses on the Athenian citizens’ and the Eumenides’ courageous decision to suffer together, not merely to live together, in an attempt to find a new possibility of democratic coexistence.