“The River of Justice” Its Motivations and Circumstances

The focus on human nature brings the authors of classical literature to life, lifting them from the pages of ancient mythology into a current relationship with humanity. Many of these ancient authors utilize the timelessness of justice as a compelling driver of their poems and narratives. It has been established that human nature’s demand for justice is more than science, and more than a social construct. It is an intuitive human trait with its moorings in the creation story. The book of Genesis provides many examples of right and wrong, both justice and injustice. Genesis 1:27 says, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” [1] This verse suggests mankind reflects the divine attribute of justice as part of human nature, acknowledging the inherent value of individual dignity. Mankind complicates life only two chapters later when Genesis 3 introduces sin in the garden which ultimately leads to suffering and injustice. Characters such as Achilles, Antigone, Creon, and Socrates in the works of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato, show how mankind bends justice to serve personal and political ends, obscuring its original divine purpose to uphold human dignity.

With mankind’s sin now entwined with God’s creation plan, justice has taken on a variety of forms. In many ways, it is a blood relation to other universals. Social order and the stability of a just society require personal trust, fairness, the moral awareness of right and wrong, and the need for equal justice. Additionally, the universal theme of sacrifice is unique in its relationship to justice because it requires an offender to give something up – time, comfort, status. More significantly, it may involve freedom, money, privileges, even a life. How hard would it be for someone to sacrifice their life, their wealth, their honor for a state or a person who had been unjust to them?

The answer may depend on circumstances and personal motivations which serve up the quandary of what mankind has done with God’s justice. Homer provides rich details in The Iliad of how circumstances act to sharpen different forms, such as “restorative justice,” and “retributive justice.”

In this poem, King Agamemnon disrespected and dishonored the great warrior Achilles by taking his slave and lover, Briseis, from him. The affront was too much for Achilles to bear. He turned to a form of retributive justice to balance the insult from the King, seeking to punish him by withdrawing his army from battle. This led to the Achaeans suffering greatly at the hands of the Trojans on the battlefield. The King responded with his own attempt at restorative justice designed to repair the perceived harm and restore his relationship with Achilles, motivated by his need to get Achilles and his army to return to battle.

He sent Achilles’ best friends to deliver a list of spectacular gifts. His friend Odysseus added their imploration, “The King will give you gifts to match his insults if only you’ll relent and end your anger,” (Homer, pg. 71). This anger motivated Achilles’ view of justice. Current authors continue to address the impact of anger on appropriate justice.

Attorney Bryan Stevenson, who spent his legal career defending the poor and disadvantaged authored a book titled, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. In his book, Stevensen addresses the danger of injecting such intense anger into justice. He wrote, “Fear and anger are a threat to justice. They can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous.”

The infection Stevenson refers to can be seen in Achilles’ blind anger. Agamemnon’s restoration effort was not the mind of Achilles. His body and soul were afflicted by an anger that soon grew into a rage, affecting not only Achilles but others on both sides of the Trojan conflict which very nearly ended in disaster for the Achaeans.

His reaction to the wrong he had suffered was to punish the King for his wrongdoing. Achilles, a man of war, had chosen the severest form of retribution he could visit upon the King. He saw only moral clarity in his response. With a counter view to that of Stevenson, Achilles’ point of view would seem supported by Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth century Western philosopher who said, “He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.” [2]

In a dramatic change of Achilles’ attitude, his motivations changed significantly when confronted with the circumstances of the grieving King Priam, who sought the release of the corpse of his son, Hector. Now, he turned his concerns away from the wrongs he endured at the hands of Agamemnon to Priam’s grief which persuaded him to seek to repair the harm he had done indirectly to the old King. Priam’s great appeal was too much for Achilles to ignore when he said, “I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before – I have put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son,” (Homer, pg. 103). Such unquestioned sincerity freed Achilles from the slavery of his anger. Through his pity for Priam, his motivation had changed from the need for retribution against Hector’s corpse to a desire to reconcile his needs with those of Priam.

As with Agamemnon, Achilles, and Priam, in The Iliad, we see a significant focus on justice in Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone. Sophocles authors an epic clash between King Creon and Antigone. The quarrel begins with the deaths of Antigone’s brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, who killed each other in battle over the Theban kingship. As a result of their deaths, Creon ascended to the throne and decreed Polynices to be a traitor for attacking Thebes and unworthy of an honorable burial. To Creon, this was justice, a retributive justice of punishment for his treason.

Antigone’s motivation differed from the King. She loved her brother, lamenting the injustice inflicted upon his corpse and his honor to be left unburied. Her moral obligation and love for Polynices led her to take action. She intended to right the King’s wrong even with the certainty it would cost her own life. C.S. Lewis offers a perspective on the power and value of love, saying, “Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.” [3] She also felt an obligation to the gods to give Polynices his rightful burial. She said, “These laws – [gods’ law] I was not about to break them, not out of fear of some man’s wounded pride, and face the retribution of the gods,” (Sophocles, pg. 374). These considerations gave her a different point of view and led her to seek a different form of justice, “corrective justice,” to rectify an offense to morality and to the gods by leaving Polynices unburied. Sophocles expresses the essence of their argument in this exchange about traditional Theban burial honors:

Antigone: “No matter – Death longs for the same rights for all.”
Creon: “Never the same for the patriot and the traitor,” (Sophocles, pg. 376).

Once again, in Antigone we see how mankind’s motivations and circumstances affect the meaning of justice.

Justice continues its metamorphosis from God’s original intention in Plato’s, The Apology – The Mission of Socrates. Socrates was found guilty of “impiety and corruption of the young,” what some would call a trumped up charge rooted more in the political prejudice against him than for any legal wrongdoing. The philosophical dialogue that ensues was about Socrates perspective of justice as imposed by the state which had delivered his sentence of death. His wealthy friend Crito, who saw a great injustice in the jury’s finding and sentence, offered Socrates a plan for his escape. However, Socrates would have none of it and firmly refused his friend’s offer. The basis of his refusal was the fundamental belief in the sanctity of “legal justice” regardless of its imperfections.

Over much of the writing, Socrates submits an intellectual argument from a personified Justice supporting his death sentence. Using his own words, Justice says, “Do you expect to have such license against your country and its laws that if we try to put you to death in the belief that it is right to do so, you on your part will try your hardest to destroy your country and its laws in return?” (Plato, pg. 502). It boggles the mind to think he went on to seal his fate with words from his own lips, but such was his sense of moral obligation to society and the fulfillment of the law. For Socrates, legal justice was an indispensable value and societal need he would not deny. Little did Socrates know he was living up to a credo from Martin Luther King Jr. which would be uttered some two-thousand years later when he said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy” [4]

The shadow of Socrates’ execution follows Plato into Epistle VII, his letter written to followers of Dion who was murdered in Syracuse. As a young man, Plato was invited to join the political leaders of Syracuse, some of whom he knew personally. He agreed to join them because he thought it “to be a proper undertaking.” Appearing the idealogue at his young age, he said, “I thought that they were going to lead the city out of the unjust life she had been living and establish her in the path of justice . . .” (Plato, pg. 511). This statement likely alluded to the unjust execution of Socrates. It established Plato’s political philosophy, one based on the need for both social and legal justice which would include fairness in decision making, equity across society and the unbiased application of the law. He drew upon his admiration of Socrates’ wisdom when he argued that no one currently in power understood the true nature of justice either to the state or to an individual. He said, “ . . . the ills of the human race would never end until either those who are sincerely and truly lovers of wisdom come into political power, or the rulers of our cities, by the grace of God, learn true philosophy,” (Plato, pg. 512).

Whether successful in merging his philosophical ideas with Athen’s real-world politics, is not addressed in the letter. But it clearly identified the conflict of ideas that would define a just government. His point of view was based on the necessity of wisdom and philosophy in Athen’s politics while the reality was an existence of “corruption of our written laws and our customs,” (Plato, pg. 511).

Homer – but a poet, Sophocles – a not so simple playwright, and Plato – a philosopher in the tradition of Socrates, were three giants of classical literature, each showing timeless lessons about how to view justice. Yet in all their talent and wisdom, the sharing of their concept of justice in a sin addled world, met with little success. Neither they nor their contemporaries had the benefit of God’s creation story. Nor did they know that mankind was made in the Almighty’s image and therefore a recipient of the divine attribute of true justice. Yet, their human nature was replete with a natural awareness of right and wrong as God originally intended.

Justice began as a river, a river of simple fairness and impartiality, the moral rightness of things and integrity of each person. As Genesis teaches, sin eroded its banks and flowed into rivulets, mixing its purity with mankind’s desire for power, acts of greed, and fear of others. It was no longer the monolith of God’s creation but a polylith of human motivations and circumstances. Justice had lost its innocence.

One can find hundreds of credible philosophical thoughts and quotes that lament the formation of these perversions of God’s justice. Those that resonate the most urge mankind to own the moral responsibility of understanding justice is fundamentally a question of how humans treat other humans. Jimmy Carter said, “In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and lawbooks, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect.” [5]

Similarly, Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Sr., frequently spoke of justice both directly and indirectly, and the need for mankind to live by biblical principles. He said, “We must, from the highest office in the land right down to the shoeshine boy in the airport, have a return to biblical basics.” [6] Falwell’s point, along with those of countless other wise scholars, theologians, and philosophers from the classics to current day, was that justice is found in the root and stem of the inspired word of God.

“Sacred Scars”

A scar from sin lays across my soul
like a rapier’s sword slash, now wholly
healed by the redemptive resurrection.
Such sacred scars like fallen stars,
reveal no secrets are hidden
from the holy light shining out
of the uttermost edge of the heavens.

This light anchors me like a tree
of steel, sinking deep roots that quiet
the random wind of sin,
now washed clean in the river by
baptism. I am but a bruised fruit,
blessed with a scar of sacred unction,
God’s mercy and grace.

Though I am writhen from His intentions
by a crooked path of protruding
rocks that mock my sinful journey,
my way back is always opened
by asking a simple question –
who is Jesus?

Works Citied:

Homer, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” The Norton Book of Classical Literature, Knox, Bernard, editor, Copyright 1993 by Bernard Knox, W.W. Norton & Co., 500 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y.

Sophocles, “Antigone,” The Norton Book of Classical Literature, Knox, Bernard, editor, Copyright 1993 by Bernard Knox, W.W. Norton & Co., 500 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y.

Plato, “The Apology” and “Epistle VII-Plato and Politics,” The Norton Book of Classical Literature, Knox, Bernard, editor, Copyright 1993 by Bernard Knox, W.W. Norton & Co., 500 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y.

Stevenson, Bryan, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. 2019 Speigel and Grau trade and paperback edition. Speigel and Grau, 2019.

[1] Book of Genesis, The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, New RSV, Copyright 2003 by Abingdon Press.

[2] http://www.Quotlr.com, 75 Retributive Justice Quotes, August 4, 2025.

[3] Top 25 Quotes by C.S. Lewis (of 2057) | A-Z Quotes, August 6, 2025

[4] http://www.azquotes.com/Martin_Luther_King_Jr, August 6, 2025

[5] restoration of justice where true justice has lost its way, Microsoft Copilot, August 4, 2025

[6] http://www.brainyquotes.com/Jerry_Falwell, August 7, 2025