Portrayals of parricide

For a long time, the law treated parricide as an extremely serious act that warranted severe punishment. Nowadays, its singular legal status seems to have disappeared. In the way it is portrayed outside the law, however, parricide has lost none of its symbolic power. From Greek mythology to contemporary science fiction, from Roman texts to genre cinema, the murder of the father has always been portrayed and interpreted as a radical attack on world order.