A gendered analysis of social and religious values in 5th century BCE illuminates the Athenian decline from democracy to bully empire, through pursuit of a faux virility. Using a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, the study contrasts two playwrights bookending the empire: Aeschylus, who elevated the sky pantheon Olympians and demoted both actual Athenian women and the Furies—deities linked to maternal ties and nature, and Sophocles, who granted Oedipus, his maternal incest purified, an apotheosis in the Furies’ grove. The latter work, (...) presented at the Athenian tragic festival some 50 years after the first, advocated restoration of respect for female flesh and deity. This redemptive narrative placed the life of Athens— democracy and empire—in the wider context of Nature. Present-day parallels are drawn. (shrink)