Introduction to Ancient Greek Theater, Followed by Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (Updated with some corrections 2/11/08)Books and Online Resources:
Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today.
http://www.didaskalia.net/index.html. 3-D theatre and mask reconstructions, excellent introductory material on Greek and Roman theatre and stagecraft.
Easterling, P. E.
The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Kaufmann, Walter.
Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Ley, Graham.
A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.
McLeish, Kenneth.
A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.
Perseus Project.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ . Electronic texts (original languages and translations), critical studies, etc. An impressive resource for classicists.
Pomeroy, Sarah et al.
Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Religious Roots of Tragedy: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January. Though classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 BCE, it developed earlier from choral religious ceremonies dedicated to Dionysus.
The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth McLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.
At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like
The Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.
Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot—the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.
The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.
Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.
The playwright was called a
didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen—he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.
The Theater: The theater for the City Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. The Didaskalia Classics site offers 3-D images of a later reconstruction:
http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/recreatingdionysus.html.
The theater had three parts:
1. Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone. 2. Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed. 3. Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits.
The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t. Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.
The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.
Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history—both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.
Tragic Masks: The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. (Visit Didaskalia’s interactive 3-D mask page at
http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/visual_resources/images/masks/mask_mm/rotmask1.html.) Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression—as Kenneth McLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:
“Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance—an unsettlingly Dionysian experience” (9).
That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because—Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding—not much happens in many Greek tragedies. Instead, chorus members and characters “take up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting events that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but the characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, gain perspective on the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving the audience towards catharsis. Character, he says, will reveal itself in relation to the play’s action.
Aristotle’s theory of drama—we didn’t cover this much in our class, but if you would like to read something about it, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (
http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/), where (in the entry for Week 2) I cover
The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance—for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.
Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia Background: the House of Atreus, adapted from Apollodorus’ First- or Second-Century CE compendium The Library of Greek Mythology. Pelops married Hippodameia, a success he achieved when the lady convinced Myrtilos to murder another suitor, Oinomaos, by rigging his chariot to fall apart during a race. As he died, he cursed Pelops and his descendants. (Pelops was the son of Tantalos, who, aside from having shared ambrosia with mortals, had also tried to fool Zeus and served him a banquet containing his son Pelops as a sacrifice, thereby bringing punishment down on his head; Pelops was then brought back to life.) Well, two of Pelops’ sons are Atreus and Thyestes (though in Aeschylus’ version, they are his grandsons, fathered by Pelops’ son Pleisthenes). Atreus married Catreus’ daughter Aerope (granddaughter of Minos), but Aerope fell in love with Thyestes. Atreus had promised to sacrifice a golden lamb to Artemis, but instead killed it and locked it in a chest. Aerope gave the lamb to Thyestes, who then used it to win the kingdom of Mycenae—it seems an oracle had told the Mycenaeans that they should seek a Pelopid for their king, and Thyestes then insisted that they should choose the man who possessed a golden lamb. This was convenient, since he just happened to have stolen it from the unsuspecting Atreus. But Zeus later took Atreus’ part, which resulted in the banishment of Thyestes. One day Atreus, now king, found out that his brother had slept with Aerope, and decided to seek revenge—he invited his banished brother back to court on the pretense that reconciliation was possible, but then he snatched Thyestes’ sons Aglaos, Callileon, and Orchomenos from the altar of Zeus (god of suppliants, as Homer tells us), cut off their limbs, and served them as a meal to Thyestes. An oracle told Thyestes that if he wanted counter-revenge, he should sleep with his daughter Pelopeia. He did, and the union produced Aegisthus, who went on to kill Atreus and return the kingdom to Thyestes, ruling with him jointly in Mycenae. Agamemnon, the doomed hero of Aeschylus’ trilogy and of course the brother of Menelaus, Helen’s husband, was a son of Atreus, and he had supposedly helped to capture the adulterer Thyestes, father of Aegisthus. Agamemnon married Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister) after murdering her first husband (Tantalos, son of Thyestes). So when Aegisthus participates in the plot to murder Agamemnon, he is taking his revenge for the outrage Atreus committed against Thyestes.
The lesson that emerges from this troubled tale is that both Atreus and Thyestes are steeped in outrage, incest, and blood, and in fact their father Pelops had long since drawn a curse on himself that landed on their heads. The best thing descendants of these people could do is opt out of the House, but of course that’s not possible, so they all suffer for the sins of their fathers. Things only get worse when, at least in one version, Agamemnon listens to his priest Calchas and sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia by Clytemnestra from military necessity—they need a fair wind to make it to Troy and pay back Priam for the dishonor his son Paris had brought to Menelaus of Sparta by stealing away with his wife Helen. So Clytemnestra has a powerful reason to despise Agamemnon, and so does Aegisthus, her lover.
Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, from The Oresteia 1-44. The Watchman has been commanded by Clytemnestra to watch for the signal-fire indicating that Troy has fallen. He says that Clytemnestra maneuvers like a man, and he refers darkly at line 42 to the secrets of the House of Atreus, or, more directly, the secrets of Agamemnon’s house. At line 25, he invokes the motif of light versus darkness, greeting the daybreak as “dawn of the darkness.” This mention will come to seem ironic given that the Furies represent a dark upwelling from Hades. Another small thing worth noting is that the trilogy begins with a man on the lookout for fire-beacons as a sign of victory, and ends with references to the torches with which Athena and her helpers light the Furies’ way to their place of honor.
45-258. Here, the Chorus shows us one of its functions: simply to fill us in on things that happened before the play. But almost immediately, around line 55, they begin to complicate that task by taking up an attitude towards what they relate. Much of a Greek play can, indeed, consist in just such adopting of attitudes, whether on the part of the Chorus or of the main characters. This Aeschylan Chorus of old men judge by outcomes, and hold patriarchal values that lead them to distrust and largely discount even the strong woman Clytemnestra, who rules by proxy for Agamemnon. They invoke the gods frequently, but seem inconsistent in their statements about the relation between the divine realm and human events, desires, and predicaments. Still, what they say near the beginning of their speech here is prophetic: the Trojan War, they say, has taken on a life of its own, and there’s no way to “enchant away the rigid Fury” (78), thanks to Paris’ deep violation of Greek hospitality. Fury rages during and follows after war, as they suggest. The old men apparently resent the loss of so many kinsmen and the interruption of their normal lives during such a long, drawn-out military expedition. They lament their own situation, saying that they have been dishonored: they are the “husks” (80) of Argos, the non-heroic elders who have remained behind with women and children. On the whole, the Chorus registers the tensions that the trilogy’s individual characters and gods must work out: the status of women, the role of the Olympians, the power of the revenge cycle, and the province of law.
The elderly Chorus members claim (line 112ff) that they still have the gift of persuasion and perhaps even of prophecy: they link themselves to what the prophet Calchas had said about a sign sent by the gods, namely a pair of eagles swooping down upon a pregnant rabbit and thereby infuriating Artemis. This event may have presaged the sacrificial killing of Iphigeneia by the Greek kings, Agamemnon foremost among them. At line 150, they speak of Clytemnestra as “the architect of vengeance” in a manner that places her alongside the enraged Artemis, and fear what she may do when Agamemnon returns. Much of what the Chorus members say at this point consists in venting their frustrations about their personal situation and their anxiety about the war’s consequences. (Later on, we shall find a new and more action-oriented kind of language at work in other characters.) But they try to hold on to some degree of hope, and wish piously, “good win out in glory in the end” (125 and 160).
The Chorus next introduces the theme of the fall of royal houses (line 165ff), a pattern that began with the gods: while the male principle may reign supreme, its rule has been anything but serene since the patriarchal gods Kronos, Saturn, and Zeus fought with one another. At line 180, the Chorus claims that we may “suffer into truth” and that we shall attain “ripeness” (182) or a degree of wisdom and balance. They believe, in other words, that we learn only through suffering. The Greek passage for lines 180-84 runs τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ- / σαντα, τὸν πάθειμάθος / θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. / στάζει δ’ ἔν θ’ ὕπνῳ πρὸκαρδίας / μνησιπήμων πόνος : καὶ παρ ’ ἄ- / κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. / δαιμόνων δ έπου χάρις βίαιος / σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. (It’s the same passage that Robert F. Kennedy found moving and quoted as “ Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”) From line 200-57, the Chorus goes on to detail Agamemnon’s frenzy in killing his daughter, and the bind in which he has been placed—he can either do justice to his own daughter and let down his fleet, or he can do justice to the public cause and kill his daughter. Either choice will bring consequences. Agamemnon realizes he may bring another curse upon his own house. His was not a willing sacrifice, so it was not a pure one.
258-358. Although the Chorus members say they trust the Queen, towards whom they now turn to address, they keep peppering her with doubts, and at 277, Clytemnestra says she feels they are treating her like a child and ridiculing her, and she explains how she set up the torch-signal system as a way of learning the outcome of the Trojan War: “And I ordained it all. / Torch to torch, running for their lives, / one long succession racing home my fire” (313-15). Her words are rewarded with the pronouncement, “Spoken like a man, my lady, loyal, / full of self-command” (354-56).
359-492. Clytemnestra having re-entered the palace, the Chorus praises Jupiter and the Goddess Night. Now they see the fall of Troy as justice, momentarily realigning themselves with the Queen’s view. But they continue to emphasize the pain and anguish caused by war, and by line 470, they have returned to questioning Clytemnestra’s authority, finding it impossible to accept that a woman can rule.
493-682. The Herald enters and first informs the Chorus that the war has indeed ended. He gives us the soldier’s perspective on war, with all its confusion, despair, and triumph. Agamemnon is nearby. When Clytemnestra enters at line 580, she publicly declares her loyalty to the soon-returning King; she has been, she insists, utterly faithful and pure: “in ill repute I am / as practiced as I am in dyeing bronze” (607-08).
The Herald departs after telling the Chorus (which remains after Clytemnestra returns to the palace) that Menelaus has been swept away by the sea-storms that hit the returning Greek fleet. Like Odysseus of Ithaca, Menelaus is destined to do some wandering before he makes it back home, in his case to Sparta. As for the cause of the storms, here is what Apollodorus says in his compendium of Greek myths:
“Troy is sacked … Lokrian Aias [Ajax], when he saw Kassandra clinging to the wooden statue of Athena, raped her: for this reason the wooden image gazes up to the sky … As they were about to sail off after ravishing Troy, they were held back by Kalkhas[Calchas], who told them that Athena was enraged at them because of the impious act of Aias. They were on the verge of slaying Aias when he ran to an altar, so they let him live. After all this they held an assembly, during which Agamemnon insisted they stay and sacrifice to Athena. So Diomedes, Nestor, and Menelaos all left at the same time. The first two had a good voyage, but Menelaos encountered a storm … Agamemnon left after making his sacrifice, and put in at Tenedos. Thetis came to persuade Neoptolemos to wait two days and make sacrifices, and he obeyed her. But the others left and were overtaken by storms in the region of Tenos, for Athena had begged Zeus to send a storm upon the Hellenes. Many ships sank. Athena threw a thunderbolt at the ship of Aias. As the ship fell apart, he scrambled to safety on a rock and declared that he had survived despite Athena’s designs. Then Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, splitting it in two, and Aias fell into the sea and was drowned.” Apollodorus,
The Library E5.22-6.6.
683-793. The Chorus members set forth their view of the Trojan War’s cause: Helen. That view is hardly uncommon, though I wouldn’t pin it on Homer’s epics—Homer is more sophisticated than that. (Gorgias of Leontini deals the anti-Helenistas a blow in his famous “Encomium of Helen,” providing a number of argument-lines in the great lady’s favor.) But the Chorus members say also that “Only the reckless act / can breed impiety, multiplying crime on crime” (751-52). As the Norton editors point out, this view departs from the common one that too much good fortune in itself is enough to bring disaster on mere mortals.
794-841. Agamemnon completely misses the point of the Chorus’ warning about disloyalty at home. The conquering hero is tone-deaf, a politician-king too drunk with his own glory to hear what others are saying to him or, at least until the end of his address to the Chorus, to notice that Clytemnestra has been hauling out the Tyrian red carpet for his entry. He thinks the most important thing now is to establish a tribunal to hear “this cause involving men and gods” (830). He may be addressing the Chorus’ concerns as he understands them—i.e. the traitors, whoever they may be, must be tried and punished. His next words are full of unintended irony: “Wherever something calls for drastic cures / we make our noblest effort: amputate or wield / the healing iron, burn the cancer at the roots” (834-36).
842-976. Addressing first the Chorus, Clytemnestra tries to build sympathy for her loneliness and suffering during Agamemnon’s long absence at Troy. To the King himself, she explains that their son Orestes has been sent away, supposedly to keep him safe in case disaster should strike at home. Dissembling her rage at him, she overcompensates by insisting that he must enter the palace only by walking on a Tyrian crimson or purple carpet. Agamemnon distrusts this gesture and finds it excessive, declaring bluntly that his wife is trying to reverse their roles and make him out to be an effeminate dandy: “You treat me like a woman. Groveling, gaping up at me! / What am I, some barbarian peacocking out of Asia? (912-13) Agamemnon himself has already spoken like a true politician, flattering and impressing the Chorus, but now he finds his wife’s words and gestures insincere. Clytemnestra manages to bend his will to hers even as they both compete in a display of strength. The Trojan War was initiated to avenge an act of inhospitality and betrayal, and now the chief among the Greeks’ returning heroes is to be brought down by the supreme inhospitality of his own wife.
977-1031. The Chorus is terrified, and seems to hear a “dirge of the Furies” (994) promising death to Agamemnon. There may be some hint of the Atreides’ history, but it seems that as yet the exact nature of the threat is not specified. Perhaps, as the editors suggest, the Chorus fears for Agamemnon because of his “triumphant excess” in the Trojan War, wherein so many on both sides have died.
1032-1368. Cassandra the captured Trojan priestess of Apollo builds suspense while we await the outcome of Agamemnon’s somewhat unwilling entrance into the palace. Refusing the Queen’s devious invitation to enter after Agamemnon, Cassandra laments and rails wildly, retelling the curse of the House of Atreus, which she describes as “the house that hates god, / an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen torturing kinsmen, severed heads, / slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood” (1088-91). She reinvokes the horrible banquet to which Thyestes was treated by Atreus (see above, “ Background: the House of Atreus”) , and tries in vain to make the Chorus understand that even now the slaughter is being prepared as Clytemnestra casts her “net flung out of hell” to trap Agamemnon and render him helpless for the death blow. Cassandra finely refers to herself as the “last ember” (1174) of burning Troy, and laments her city’s losses. When the Chorus members ask her how she knows so much about the shameful history of the Atreides, she explains her relationship with Apollo—the god, enraged at her last-minute refusal to have intercourse with him, burdened her with the gift of prophetic powers that would nonetheless carry no weight with those Cassandra tries to warn. She knows now that she was brought to Argos to meet her fate alongside Agamemnon, and in the end resigns herself to it, asking only in her last dirge that “when the avengers cut the assassins down / they will avenge me too” (1348-49).
1369-1604. The deed is done, and Clytemnestra is by no means in the mood to quiet down and “lawyer up,” as they say on today’s crime shows. No, she positively
exults in her bloody act: “Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment— / Now it makes me proud to tell the truth” (1391-92). She even struck the King a third time, she says, for good measure, and standing before the Chorus, she declares, “I revel / like the Earth when the spring rains come down, / the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear / splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!” (1412-13) Agamemnon, she says, is her “masterpiece of Justice” (1430), and although the feeble Chorus would banish her on the spot, she is at this moment more conquering hero than Greek woman—quite a transgressive thing to be in a patriarchal culture like that of the ancient Greeks, and not a role acceptable to the Chorus, who in spite of her heroism see her as a deceiver rather than as the bold warrior she wants to be. She has long resented and loathed Agamemnon for several reasons. There was his covetousness regarding Achilles’ prized concubine Chryseis over in Troy—now Cassandra lies dead in proxy payment for that insult. And when the Chorus invokes Helen as the cause of it all again, Clytemnestra turns on them furiously: “never turn / your wrath on her, call her / the scourge of men” (1491-92). At this point, the Queen claims to be nothing less than the Fury that follows the doomed House of Atreus: “Fleshed in the wife of this dead man, / the spirit lives within me, / our savage ancient spirit of revenge. / In return for Atreus’ brutal feast / he kills his perfect son—for every murdered child, a crowning sacrifice” (1528-32). Agamemnon was, of course, the son of Atreus, so killing him is payback on the part of Thyestes. Perhaps most heinous of Agamemnon’s outrages, however, is the fact that he sacrificed daughter Iphigeneia for the fleet’s sake on the way to Troy, as Calchas the priest directed him.
1605-1708 (end). Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, enters and reminds everyone of the dreadful banquet to which his father had been treated. Together, he and Clytemnestra somewhat ignominiously brave the feeble old Chorus, with Aegisthus even claiming he will work to civilize the rude people of Argos. The play ends with Clytemnestra’s declaration to Aegisthus, “Let them howl—they’re impotent. You and I have power now. / We will set the house in order once for all.” Which remark, of course, sounds like the mother of all premature conclusions: there simply is no way to set the House of Atreus in order—at least not here in Argos itself.
Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, from The Oresteia 1-65. Pythia prays first to earth and tradition, and then she mentions Phoebus Apollo, the civilized and prophetic god. Apollo speaks for Zeus. She praises Athena, Dionysus, and Zeus. We might take this prayer as foretelling need to placate all the gods, and the Furies later. As Simon Goldhill says, relations in the divine order mirror the uncertainty and strife we see in the human realm. Right after this prayer, at line 33, Pythia appears to be shaken: she envisions first a man, Orestes, coming as suppliant to Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi. She also sees beings that she can’t identify and that must have to do with pollution. From lines 33-65, Pythia insists that Apollo must purge his own house: the gods are not exempt from the need to purify their order after their deeds have befouled it.
66-96. Apollo promises to help Orestes. Even Apollo does not name the Furies, though he calls them eternal virgins and obscenities. He counsels Orestes to go to Athena’s sanctuary. At line 85, Apollo says he’ll devise the master stroke—it seems he admits some responsibility for what has happened. Orestes wants strict justice, which Apollo knows must be tempered with compassion or at least with a sense of realism. The Furies are loathed by men and gods, so they will all have to come to terms with these creatures.
97-139. Clytemnestra rouses the Furies. She says that for those she killed, the charges of the dead will never cease. Her own Furies owe her something—a dream is calling them, she says. The Furies cry out in their sleep, “Get him.” A dream calls them, and now Clytemnestra calls them. The underworld’s shades are not phantoms—they are real and have real effects upon those they visit. At line 136, Clytemnestra insists that the charges she levels are just. As always, she does not lack for eloquence combined with a certain bluntness. Orestes having escaped, the Furies awaken.
144-75. The Furies speak, first lamenting the loss of their prey. The quarry has slipped from the nets—that’s the same reference used in reference to Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon. She will set them on Orestes as hunters. Unless this happens, thinks Clytemnestra, there’s no justice. Around line 173, the Furies accuse Apollo of polluting his own shrine.
176-232. Apollo argues with the Furies, who (at line 151) have accused him of taking away their prerogatives. He sides with civility, reason, and order, employing a series of violent images to describe the Furies—they belong with wild animals and with people who act like wild animals. Apollo doesn’t accept their right to be where they are. But isn’t he denying the prerogative of the revenge cycle, which he calls unacceptable and loathsome? He says the order of Olympus will be against the Furies, but that won’t happen at the trilogy’s end. Apollo accuses the Furies of being unbalanced in their notions about justice: they privilege Clytemnestra because killing a mother is killing irreplaceable flesh and blood, and with that proposition the male god disagrees. At line 222, Apollo puts his faith in Athena. At line 230, he says that Orestes would become a terror to gods and men, a frustrated suppliant, if his killing of Clytemnestra isn’t validated. Incivility and not keeping one’s word, not observing proper relations between gods and men, are Apollo’s greatest anxieties. He has no problem with more or less “forgetting” how the Olympian order itself came to power, it seems.
233-407. Orestes prays to Athena’s statue, but his call for help isn’t answered at once. The Furies, with their references to hunting, appear to him first. Notice the reference to the Eagle of Zeus hunting the hare. At line 235, Orestes says he’s purified, his hands are clean. But he’s still an outcast, and the Furies don’t recognize his statement as valid. They have come to a holy part of the City, thirsting for blood.
253-73. The Furies speak of their kind of justice—blood for blood, not Athenian law. They invoke the might of Hades, their own realm. They don’t see this invocation as a call to perpetual anarchy: the accounts of men’s deeds are written on Hades’ tablets. Revenge, as Sir Francis Bacon says disapprovingly in an essay written around 1600, is “a kind of wild justice.” The Furies favor the argument from antiquity: their justice is binding upon men and gods, and it predates (and therefore supercedes) written law and civic institutions. Perhaps Aeschylus wants to show the persistence of tradition even in the fifth-century-BCE present. One cannot wish away the violent past or the traditional ways of dealing with it. Even settled law and order are always beset by the threat of violence, and it’s vital not to forget that fact.
287-90. Orestes invokes Athena; he wants justice without a battle. He wants a new settlement for himself and Argos.
304-06. The Furies assert their own parallel authority: they must sacrifice Orestes to their own law, unwillingly, which is corrupt sacrificial practice. (Ritual sacrifice of animals, by the way, called for getting the victim to “nod” approval of its treatment.) Just as Apollo said he would use a spell, so will they. They sing a chain-song to bind human beings, a song we must balance against the Olympian hymns at the trilogy’s end, and vice versa. The two songs must, that is, be made to harmonize.
307-407. The Furies extol the independence of their own realm, and the result is an oxymoronic hymn of fury. They pray to their Mother Night (Nyx), and call Apollo a whelp. Nobody can shake their grip, and the Fates have given them independence even from the gods. They mock the notion of a trial, standing instead upon their rights. They insist at line 363 that Zeus wouldn’t champion Orestes or Apollo. Everyone is arguing over what the gods will do. Neither do the Furies accept Orestes’ washing of his hands—see line 362, where he is still described as “streaked with blood.” At lines 372 and following, the Furies mock men’s dreams of grandeur—so much for human pretensions, aspirations and illusions; they will be swallowed up by this realm that antedates even the order of the gods. Proleiptically, the dreams of grandeur referenced by the Furies would include Athenian edifices of law and stone: the classical and golden era of art. All these ways of building up humanity will be lost when the Furies sing and dance. Their language threatens to undermine human beings’ attempts to use these artistic forms in the service of civilization. Here we are close to the territory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early writing about the inseparable “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” elements in Greek culture—a great deal of what we call “civilization” seems to depend upon what Nietzsche labels
forgetting—forgetting the necessary violence and cruelty that went into the beautiful forms and practices we deem worthiest of humanity. The Furies, at least (and in their unforgiving manner), don’t want us to forget. If they had their way, we may imagine the bad memories piling on top of earlier bad memories, the outraged cries filling the air with cacophony until all is overwhelmed. It would be our own fault since, after all, the Furies don’t commit the outrages themselves. Even so, the earth would soon become unlivable.
Apollo, by contrast, is determined to make his hymns to reason and Olympian order prevail: harmony will replace anarchy. This point connects to Aeschylus’ probable view of drama’s power—it’s an art form that urges harmony (or at least a working settlement) between man and god, an
understanding between them. As always with the Greeks, aesthetics turns out to be more than mere entertainment or relief; it’s part of the strategy we have devised to maintain our place on earth and in the presence of the gods. From lines 399-403, the Furies deny any possible evolution from the wild and violent to the civilized. At line 401, they refer to their own prerogatives as law. Apollonian constructions that help the Greeks endure are not to be allowed. One possible contradiction emerges from lines 396-407: the Furies say that they have their pride, but they also admit that they have been banished to the realm beneath the earth. Nonetheless, their assertion of eternal privilege and sacrosanct status does not entirely square with the facts. It seems that change
can occur, in spite of the Furies.
408-449. Athena enters, armed for combat, in defiance of what Orestes had asked. Both the Furies and Orestes start off equal in Athena’s eyes—she mixes them together. The Furies must name themselves as curses and daughters of the night. Athena is fair-minded and she will accept the facts. The Furies, meanwhile insist again that revenge never ends as far as they are concerned. Athena distinguishes between the name of justice and the act of justice; she would like to see a settlement amongst the warring parties. At lines 444 and following, a pivotal moment occurs because the Furies exhibit some interest in a settlement—this may come as a surprise considering what they claimed earlier. The point Athena makes to them is that oath-taking should never lead to injustice. As Simon Goldhill says, we are dealing in part with an argument over the purpose of language—how does it mediate between or affect the various realms?
461-65. Orestes says to Athena that he has purified himself, and then explains why he killed his mother. Apollo shares the guilt, Orestes says. He implies that he was in a bind: he had to avenge his father, or face punishment. Orestes wants to know if he has acted justly, and he wants things to end.
484-85. Even Athena will call for a full trial—humans must get involved. She acknowledges the Furies’ power. So she is in a bind, too, along with Agamemnon over Iphigenia, Clytemnestra over the murder of Iphigenia, and Orestes over both his parents. It seems that the divine realm mirrors the uncertainty of the human realm with regard to relationships.
497-99. From the interaction between men and gods will come a way to settle the problems permanently. A new justice that will involve all three realms.
506-71. The Furies sing a powerful song: if Orestes wins, they ask, what’s the point of living? Violence would overwhelm the cosmos. They say 536-41 that they want a settlement and ‘‘ measure.’’ At this point, revenge consists in measure. We will find later that Athena agrees with them, at least to an extent. The Furies see themselves as powers bringing order and measure when humans threaten anarchy. They ally themselves with a kind of justice we might not have given them credit for understanding. In essence, they counsel that
fear restrains men and women from doing injustice, that fear lies at the heart of religion itself—who will respect the gods if there is no fear, if all is decided and arranged on the basis of shallow reason?
What, therefore, must happen? Humans must accept the Furies as a counterforce, and must accept them into the civic space and psyche of Athens. In being accepted, they are renamed as “the Well-Abiding” rather than the Erinyes or Furies. Are they transformed, or are people’s perceptions of them transformed? It seems to me that the latter is the case. Violent impulses and movements must always be hemmed in by the Furies’ “tide that threatens to sweep the world.” Anarchy and violence are present in the founding of civic order, and cannot be banished entirely. Rather, we need words, song, dance, law, and magic charms to contain it and yet embrace its presence and power over us. See line 517: we can only define true justice against what threatens it. Anarchy faces those who deny the Furies’ power.
585: Apollo says he’s partly responsible, and asks that the trial proceed. He has always said he trusted Athena.
591-614. The Fury leader questions Orestes, who turns to Apollo. The Fury leader is playing lawyer at this point—this “lawyering up” constitutes tacit consent to the trial, to the institution of a new kind of justice. They want to be players in this new game.
630-84. Apollo argues back, using Athena as his main exhibit in favor of the male principle. She sprang from Zeus’ head, and Zeus is the most powerful god of all. From 643 on, Apollo offers a lawyerly description of Clytemnestra’s crime. His enthusiasm, though brief, evokes her exultant language transforming the deed. At 650, the Furies remind Apollo that Zeus shackled his father Cronos. Apollo’s response is emotional, not rational—he’s really praising might as right. Still, when humans do an injustice, it’s irretrievable, while Zeus can make things right. But the Furies still want to know at lines 661-63 how Orestes could possibly fit into the civic order given what he has done. From 665-84, Apollo makes his concluding speech or “peroration” to warlike Athena, as a negation of the female principle. But Athena is still a
goddess, so things are more complicated than Apollo credits. He appeals to the male principle in Athena, who was not, we recall, born of a mother—she sprang fully grown from the head of Zeus.
692-725. Athena sounds much like the Furies as she calls for the casting of lots. Neither anarchy nor tyranny should be the goal; we must never banish terror from the gates, not outright. The Areopagus will remain “swift to fury.” Notice the reference to keeping watch, which is the way the trilogy began. Athena’s act is foundational—here she inaugurates and defines the powers of the Court of the Areopagus. There seems to be a mixing together of the male and female. She mentions the Amazons who fought Duke Theseus. Notice the phallic language Fagles (our translator) employs. The Amazons sacrifice to Ares, god of war, and Athena is standing with the Amazons. As for the Areopagus, the term ties in to contemporary politics just before Aeschylus’ play was produced. In 462 BCE, a democratic, anti-Spartan reformer named Ephialtes tried to limit the still mostly aristocratic power of the Council of the Areopagus mainly to homicide cases. He was later assassinated, and in 461 BCE Pericles took over the reformist party and became the ascendant power in Athens until his death in 429 BCE. (That was a few years into the disastrous Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta that lasted from 431-404 BCE; the first one stretched out undeclared from 460-445 BCE). Perhaps Aeschylus’ audience would have seen the playwright’s own attitude as favoring the aristocratic Council; but one can’t be too sure about this thesis since in the play, as some critics have pointed out, the Court seems to have only the powers Ephialtes himself wanted it to have.
726-48. Here Apollo and the Furies argue. Both threaten each other. They’re all waiting to see how things will turn out. On the whole the Furies aren’t very good prosecutors—the new kind of law, born of compromise, will require a suppleness in administration and mediation that the zealous Furies lack. The only arrow in their quiver is the “slippery slope” argument that if their claim be denied, anarchy will prevail and the bloodletting will never cease. But the ten judges of the new Areopagus that Athena has founded on the site of an Amazon challenge to Duke Theseus will prove able to handle the complexities, the balancing and stressing act, required to keep the City going in future.
750. Athena declares in advance that she will vote for Orestes.
760. Orestes prays to Apollo for an end, one way or the other. They say much the same—either they’ll go down forever, or they’ll win. But things won’t be so clear-cut.
768-790. Freed, Orestes praises Athena, Apollo, and Zeus, promising Argos’ friendship with the Athenians. He says he will visit punishment on anyone who breaks the deal. He sounds like Athena and the Furies here.
791-899. The Furies reel and lament, repeating themselves in an elegiac passage. Athena bears with their anger, and shapes it. At first she doesn’t have much success. The Furies complain that much has been taken from them. Athena promises them a home. I don’t see that they change; rather, the perspective of gods and humans alters in their favor.
912-40. The Fury leader wants the power to bind people forever, and Athena acknowledges that they are connected with the dark soil, rooted in the earth. They will be the power that
underlies the City and its institutions, and whoever denies this power will face disaster. This granted, the Furies have no reason to deny Athenians the produce of their rocky soil or render the people barren.
951-1058 (end). Athena promises clarity of relations between the realms. The Furies will have a clearly defined space and role, and will suffer no dishonor. Her Olympian hymns and promises function as something like a magic spell. In Christian terms, one thinks of Faustus summoning Mephistopheles, prince of darkness. But with the Greeks we are dealing with pre-Christian legend, so it isn’t “evil” that we see in operation in
The Oresteia. The forces threatening the social space and the individual psyche are summoned in this trilogy by means of divine intervention, song, spectacle, and dance. The Furies are invited into the City, become associated with what is best in it, and are there to stay, undergirding its bright surfaces and great accomplishments. Athens can’t just banish the Furies; the City must come to terms with them, renaming them and welcoming them as guarantors of all it holds dear.
