Ethical Pluralism and Moral Conflict in Aeschylus's Oresteia

Building on the works of James J. Helm, I argue that it is both fruitful and plausible to read Aeschylus's Oresteia as expounding a coherent moral outlook. Going beyond Helm, I offer a reading of the trilogy as incorporating a system of deontic requirements that amounts to a kind of noncodifiable ethical pluralism that does not fall prey to any blatant self-contradictions and that can be interpreted either as a form of nonnaturalist realism or as a kind of communitarian constructivism.