But Homer and his worshipers of the Olympian gods achieved their happy state only by repressing an older group of gods—the ancient gods of family loyalty, who stood for fertility, blood relations, and revenge. These ancient moods of vengeance and blood loyalty—amazingly!—are simply not a part of Homer’s world. But according to Aeschylus, there was a price to repressing these ancient moods. What mattered most in his world was not the happy diversity of Homer’s Olympian gods, but the opposition between two total and uncompromising senses of what is right: the new Olympian gods represent one, the
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