Orestes is free to leave. The votes are tied, the verdict is in his favour, and he thanks Athena before promising friendship between his homeland and Athens. For the man who has been pursued, a road home has opened. The Furies, who brought the charge against him, remain. Their anger turns towards the ground beneath them. If their ancient office can be set aside, they threaten to make the life of this place wither.

Aeschylus could almost end the Eumenides with the acquittal. A fugitive has found a court, received a judgment, and said farewell to those who saved him. If we follow only his departure, the rest may look like celebration interrupted by bad losers. Instead, the play gives substantial time to those who cannot yet leave the dispute behind. A verdict has been delivered. A future for everyone still present has not.

The trial has not established that Orestes did not kill his mother. He admits the act. His defence concerns its reasons: Clytemnestra murdered his father, and Apollo instructed him to take revenge. The Furies pursue the spilling of a relative's blood. When asked why they did not pursue Clytemnestra for killing her husband, they distinguish marriage from blood relationship. Their protection was selective before this hearing began.

The defence is selective too. Apollo gives the father priority in generation and diminishes the mother's part. Athena announces her own allegiance to the father and the male. Divine speakers do not make these arguments beyond criticism. Whatever peace the ending achieves, it cannot retrospectively turn the courtroom's treatment of the dead mother into an unimportant detail.

The Furies have therefore lost more than a contest. They have acted on a prohibition that, to them, cannot simply be suspended. If someone who killed his mother can return home, what will safeguard that prohibition now? Saying that the procedure is complete does not answer the question. But their proposed answer is itself terrible: the land, its crops, and its children are to pay for their humiliation. Power exercised in pursuit of one killing is preparing to injure lives unconnected with it.

Athena first disputes their description of defeat. The equal vote, she says, has not dishonoured them. She offers a place to live and the reverence of the citizens. The Furies repeat their lament and threat. The repetition makes audible the distance between an explanation and its acceptance. Athena may define the outcome as something other than disgrace. Those whose claim has failed do not yet know how they can inhabit that definition.

She is not a mediator without force behind her. She mentions Zeus and her knowledge of where his thunderbolt is kept, then says there is no need to use it. Persuasion continues in the presence of that possibility. The qualification does not take the threat out of the conversation. The Furies now know what else stands behind the offer.

Still, pressure does not make every subsequent exchange meaningless. Athena keeps explaining what their place in the city could be. She does not require an admission that their whole history was mistaken. She also separates two things: they may decline to stay, but that refusal would not justify harming the inhabitants. Residence remains negotiable; devastation is not thereby made rightful.

Then the rhythm changes. Instead of another long curse, the Furies ask questions. Where will they live? What honour will they have? Will they really exercise the promised power? Will the arrangement last? Athena answers each in turn. The prosperity of households will depend on them. Her promises, she says, are ones she intends to fulfil.

The questions are concrete and even, by an impatient observer's standards, self-interested. Place, honour, authority, permanence: why cannot these ancient powers simply accept the decision and move on? Because moving on may mean disappearing from a world that has found a way to do without them. Before they can stop their pursuit, they need to discover whether stopping leaves them any continuing relationship with the lives they once governed.

Athena offers more than respectful language. Admiring a power as venerable while leaving it nothing to do would be a form of dismissal. Her proposal connects their honour with households, births, crops, and the ordinary continuance of the city. They will not have to make everyone suffer to demonstrate that they matter. The citizens, in turn, cannot reasonably expect to forget them once the immediate danger passes.

That bargain remains uncomfortable. Have the Furies found something new to protect, or have they exchanged an unresolved claim for status? A settlement among the living can too easily be represented as an answer for the dead. The play gives us grounds for valuing the agreement without requiring us to pronounce the original judgment perfect. It finds a way to avert a threatened disaster; that achievement has limits as well as substance.

Those limits help us see what actually changes. The Furies ask what blessings they should give. The lives previously listed as targets of retaliation return as objects of protection: the produce of the earth, animals, children. This is more specific than anger melting into kindness. They face the same vulnerable world and change what they propose to do to it.

They do not become harmless ornaments. Athena continues to describe powers that are formidable and difficult to satisfy. Their reception cannot be a day's ceremony followed by neglect. If the new arrangement depends on continuing acts from both sides, peace cannot mean that one side must never become angry again while the other has no obligations left.

The city being secured is also a bounded one. Athena opposes bloodshed among its citizens while leaving room for war against outsiders and for the honour such war may bring. This is not a proclamation of universal nonviolence. An account in which love has finally conquered all hostility would leave the people beyond the city, like the mother diminished in court, outside its field of attention.

At the end, torches and an escort give the arrangement a visible form. The Furies are to have an honoured dwelling within the land they threatened. The city receives them. A ceremony begins to turn the agreement into something people do together. It does not show every future generation keeping faith with it.

There are thus two different departures in the play. Orestes goes because his case has been decided. The Furies move towards their dwelling because they have not been expelled by that decision. They are still to be lived with. Calling both movements the end of the dispute would obscure what all the intervening speech has accomplished.

The torches do not illuminate a world in which everyone has reached the same understanding. The killing remains a killing, the partiality remains visible, and the thunderbolt has not ceased to exist. But an escort has replaced expulsion, and blessing has replaced a threatened blight. After allowing the acquitted man to go home, Aeschylus stays with those who need to work out how to share the ground beneath their feet.