Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

In the past, the time the Furies represent, people were expected to obey laws because those laws were immutable and unarguable. Most societies agree that it is wrong, unnatural even, to kill a parent. And there is a universality to some beliefs that exceed other, more culturally specific ones. The Furies are advancing similar values to those we find across other ancient societies, as we can see in the Hebrew Bible: honour your father and mother; don’t commit murder. And these are values we expect to see in place in modern societies too. We might think of them as natural laws, in contrast to less-universal ones, which we usually think of as customs or mores. So we might expect laws around marriage to be specific to one country’s legal system – deciding who you can marry, and where, and from what age. These might change as society changes, as has happened with equal marriage legislation, for example.