The Oresteia Of Aeschylus

Critic: Harry L. Levy

Source: Drama Survey, Vol. 4, Summer, 1965, pp. 149-58. Reprinted in Drama Criticism, Vol.
8
Criticism about: Aeschylus (525? B.C.-456? B.C.)

Nationality: Greek

[In this essay, which was originally delivered as an address in 1963, Levy analyzes the problem
of good and evil as presented in the Oresteia.]

The unending fascination of Greek drama, both in its original form and in modern adaptations, is
constantly confirmed here in the United States and abroad by stage presentations. As countless
lectures, symposia, and articles attest, the ancient Greek drama off-stage serves as a plentiful
source of serious discourse for scholars and thinkers of our own time. The reason is obvious: the
great Greek dramaturgists discerned and presented in striking form some of the most crucial
problems with which thoughtful human beings of all ages and all cultures must perforce concern
themselves. And so it is with the Oresteia, the great trilogy of Aeschylus: the Agamemnon, the
Libation-Bearers, and the Eumenides.

The Oresteia commences with the return of Agamemnon from Troy and his slaughter by his
queen and her paramour, tells us in the Libation-Bearers of the vengeance taken by
Agamemnon's son Orestes, now grown to manhood, and ends with Orestes' persecution by the
Furies of his mother, and his final release from the hounding of these monsters, who, changed to
Eumenides, The Kindly Ones, become a pillar of the Athenian polity. That, in brief, is the
story: but what is the meaning of it as Aeschylus presents it? Richmond Lattimore, a superb
translator and interpreter of Greek drama, thinks that he finds the answer, at least so far as the
first two plays are concerned, in the dynamic contradiction between hate and love he speaks of
hate-in-love in the Agamemnon, and love-in-hate in the Libation-Bearers. For a full explication
of hisprovocative theory, I refer you to his own writings.

But I should like to suggest to you that the problem which is central to the Oresteia is, if not
altogether different from love and hate, at least more general: the problem of good and evil. The
Greek dramatists boldly confront the fact that evil exists: they hold that it springs, sometimes
from the machinations of the gods, sometimes from the faults of men. When evil comes into
being, and harms or threatens to harm the lives of men, how are they to meet it? Shall they return
evil for evil? This is the ancient law of the Near East, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. Our trilogy is a study of the actual operation of this law in
the first two plays, and of its partial setting-aside in the third.

The first play, the Agamemnon, centers upon a double retaliation: a single act of violence
intended by each of its two perpetrators to avenge a different wrong. Clytemnestra, Queen of
Argos, and her lover Aegisthus, as we have seen, murder Agamemnon, returning victorious from
the Trojan war. The murderer-in-chief is not the man Aegisthus, but the woman Clytemnestra.
Aeschylus makes much of this point, and it bears upon the problem of the relative position of
man and woman in the structure of the Greek family, a topic to which we shall return.

Let us dispose at once of the minor retaliator, Aegisthus. He was avenging the horrible murder of
his own brothers by Agamemnon's father, Atreus: one explosion in what we may call in modern
terms a chain-reaction of evil, into the details of which it would be beside our point to go.

But what of Clytemnestra? What does she avenge by the killing of Agamemnon? It is the ritual
slaughter of her and Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon had killed at Aulis as
a sacrifice to angered divinities. The sacrifice was performed in order that the Greek fleet might
have safe passage to Troy. Now let us break into the chain at this point and consider this single
link. Had Agamemnon not killed Iphigenia, he would not have been slain in turn by
Clytemnestra. Then the specific chain-reaction of which we are speaking would not have
occurred. Could Agamemnon have avoided the killing of his daughter, when the prophet had told
him that this was the only way to secure the safe-conduct of the fleet to Troy? Yes, he could: but
it would have meant renouncing the lex talionis at this point; he would have had to forego the
revenge which he felt he and the other Greek princes were in duty bound to exact from Paris, the
seducer of Helen.

Here, then, we have in this chain of events what seems to me the first clear instance of the
decision of human will in the face of evil. That Paris' act had been evil, a breaking of the laws of
gods and men, those primary laws governing the sanctity of the family and of the host-guest
relationship, none could deny. That Paris' crime deserved punishment none could gainsay. But
who was to punish him? The wronged one, says old Near-East tradition, the wronged one, if he is
still alive; the wronged one, supported if he is alive, and replaced if he is not, by his kinsmen.
Had it been simply a matter of exacting penalty for an abominable crime, who, according to the
morality of that early time, would have raised an objection? But here the gods intervene: to
accomplish his mission of retaliation, Agamemnon must sacrifice one of his own blood, his
beloved daughter, who had often joined with her clear maiden voice in his sacrifices to the gods.
Agamemnon's anguish at the need for the choice is narrated by the Chorus. But anguished or not,
he made his choice between his duty as a father and his duty as a ruler and warrior; he killed his
daughter.

The girl is killed; the fleet sails; Agamemnon's host is victorious over the Trojans, and our heroic
general returns in glory, to boast to the people of Mycenae that he has avenged the wrong done
to Menelaus. In the vainglorious speech, there is no word of pity for the death of his innocent
daughter; this is forgotten. So far is he from feeling any pity for one who must die so that his
grand plans may advance, that he speaks with self-righteous assurance of using surgery to
amputate any offending element in the state, all unconscious a nice instance of dramatic irony
that the first victim of the knife is to be himself.

Well then, evil for evil: Paris has done wrong, Troy has been destroyed, Iphigenia has been cut
down, to use Catullus' phrase, like a flower at the edge of the meadow, when it has been touched
by the passing plowshare. Evil for evil, and there an end. But no: there is the seed of new evil
here, for Clytemnestra, a woman with a man's will, does not accept Agamemnon's choice. He has
killed her daughter; he must die in his turn. He dies, and Clytemnestra exults: This is
Agamemnon, my husband: he is dead; his death is the work of my own right hand, the work of a
righteous craftsman. And that is that! To the avenger, that is always that; the wrong is requited,
the game is over. Nowhere does Clytemnestra show any wavering, any sense of a need for choice
between slaying her king and husband, or leaving unavenged the evil of her daughter's death. Her
womanliness comes out only in the fervor of her desire vain hope to have peace, now at last,
to have an end of bloodshed. So ends the Agamemnon, the first great act of the trilogy: but just
before the close, the Chorus foreshadow the next act. They speak of their longing for the return
of Orestes, Agamemnon's young son, who has been sent away to stay with a prince in mainland
Greece. Let him come back, they pray, to avenge his father's death. Upon whom? Upon the pair
of murderers, they say. What of the fact that one of them is his mother? They take no note of that
directly.

The middle play of the trilogy, the Libation-Bearers, is so called because its first half takes place
at the tomb of Agamemnon, this at a time when, alarmed by a dream, Clytemnestra has sent her
daughter Electra to pour libations on the tomb. These are drink-offerings intended to propitiate
the spirit of Clytemnestra's slain husband, who is of course Electra's beloved father. But Orestes,
grown now and returning to his native land in disguise, has already left an offering on the tomb.
Now Orestes has come back to seek revenge: but there is this difference, that he comes at the
behest of Zeus' radiant son, the god of light and healing, Apollo. Apollo has done more than urge
Orestes to avenge his father's death; he has threatened him with the unseen but dreadful wrath of
the father, which if unappeased by exacted vengeance will end by estranging the son from gods
and men. This is the difference in the motivation: and there is a corresponding difference in the
attitude displayed, not only by Orestes but by his sister Electra. Near the beginning of the play,
Electra, for all her grief and hatred, has misgivings about calling down immediate and
unqualified retributory death upon the head of her mother and Aegisthus. Should she pray that
they be judged, or that they be punished out of hand? And when the Chorus of attendant women,
representing her elders and public opinion generally, tells her simply to pray that someone come
to kill them for the life they took, she asks whether she may pray thus without transgressing the
reverence due the gods. Yes, says the Chorus, invoking the law of retaliation; and she accepts
their judgment; but the important thing is, I suggest, not that she accepts the lex talionis in the
end, but that she questions it in the beginning a questioning that brings a new element into the
story of the accursed house of Pelops. Agamemnon, to be sure, had hesitated before killing
Iphigenia, but his was no ambivalence about inflicting vengeance on the guilty; it was rather
reluctance to make a victim of the innocent.

In the Agamemnon, we are with Clytemnestra before, during, and after her awful homicide; yet,
as we have said, never do we hear of a word of doubt, or of the slightest countervailing impulse.
Now, in this new generation, we find Electra pausing to reflect, to wonder if the gods are on the
side of blood vengeance. And for all his brave words about Apollo's command and Apollo's
support, Orestes too, a member of Electra's generation, pauses to reflect before he brushes aside
his mother's piteous plea to be spared. Again, the voice of public morals, here uttered by his
comrade Pylades, is needed to harden Orestes' heart.
But does the son rejoice, as Agamemnon had rejoiced at Troy's downfall, and Clytemnestra at
Agamemnon's? No for all that he feels certain that her punishment was just, he sorrows for it.
I grieve for what I have done, and for the suffering, and for our entire race, I who bear the
unenviable stains of this victory!

So now a victory in a vendetta can stain the victor, we learn! And both Chorus and Orestes feel
that this is not the end; that there is trouble yet to come. Nor is it slow in coming. In a clear
portrayal of the mind-shattering onset of unbearable feelings of guilt, Orestes speaks of
defending himself before his friends while yet and here I translate literally I am in
possession of my senses, for he feels his senses slipping even before the dread phantasms of his
mother's Furies, visible to him and to no one else on the stage, appear in their gory horror.

I referred before to the question of the new generation represented by Electra and Orestes: let me
revert to the matter of generations for a moment, for, like the question of sex-roles in society, it
is to have an important place in the last play of the trilogy. There are two lines in the Libation-
Bearers, almost inconsequential in themselves, which none the less typify the relationship in
Greece between the older generation and the younger: in ancient Greece, and, we may add on the
basis of my wife's study of a village in present-day Boeotia, in contemporary Greece as well. It is
on the whole a non-competing relationship, a relationship as if of heavenly bodies moving within
sight of each other, but with different orbital radii; to abandon the metaphor, there is
communication, mutual awareness, some conflict but little or no rivalry, and usually a reciprocal
respect, each party remaining conscious of the rights and values of the other, whether or not he
approves of them. So, at one point, Electra says to the Chorus of older women: Teach me, the
inexperienced one, leading me out of my ignorance! , and not fifty lines later, the same Chorus
says to Electra: Let me, old though I am, learn from a younger woman. Now when one
realizes the importance that the giving and receipt of knowledge teaching and learning
havealways had among the Greeks, the significance of this interchange becomes more weighty.

The last play opens with a scene before the temple of Apollo in Delphi, to which temple Orestes,
hounded by the Furies, has come for refuge. Here the symbolism of the conflict between Apollo,
who is Orestes' protector, and the Furies, who are his would-be destroyers, requires some
comment. Apollo, son of the sky-god Zeus, represents light, the light of the sun, of the upper air
where his father reigns; here at Delphi above all is the center of Apollo's worship as the destroyer
of the symbol of darkness, of the mighty snake Python.

Apollo is truly his father's son, the spokesman of the new regime, which, having defeated Kronos
and the earth-born Titans, wishes now to rule with reason and with justice, with the proviso that
justice would be defined by the victor. Apollo speaks for those who admire and are admired by
the builders of roads, those who admired by the builders of roads, those who tame the
wilderness. And scarcely has the play begun when Apollo foreshadows the end by speaking of
judges and of words that soothe.

On the other side, the Furies, as they never tire of telling us, are the daughters of Night; they
represent the dark powers below the earth, and the older generation of gods (please mark this)
which has been overthrown by Zeus and his fellow Olympians. They are bitterly hostile to the
new, bright gods. All their resentment is, as the play opens, directed against the God of Light,
who would protect against their dark punishments a slayer of his own mother. Matricide,
matricide, they call Orestes again and again: for they are the champions of what Bachofen was to
call the Mutterrecht, the right of the mother in the family; the supremacy of Her from the
darkness of whose womb, as if from the bowels of Mother Earth, the child has emerged.

To the obligation of the child toward his father they give mere lip-service; but the concept of
obeisance to the mother, the queen of her offspring, arouses all their emotions. They are
primitive, they belong to the early days of the world. Apollo calls them old, old women who are
at the same time children. They stand for direct vengeance, with no intermediator between the
wrong-doer and his punisher to a stage of development, if one thinks in evolutionary terms,
before society has organized to protect its members by group action.

Here, then, we have the elements of a dualistic conflict: light against darkness, the sky-father
against the earth-mother, or, in terms of other cultures, of yang against yin, of Ahura-Mazda
against Ahriman. Yet we know that Greek religion was not dualistic. How, then, is the conflict to
be resolved? This is the cosmic question which looms over and magnifies, though it is never
permitted, please note, to obscure, the human travail of Orestes.

I told you a moment ago that Apollo foreshadowed the solution by a reference to judges and to
soothing words. I have waited until now to tell you that he also referred to another divinity; to
Pallas Athena, the goddess of war and of wisdom. It was to her shrine that Orestes was to travel,
to Athens, the city which bears Athena's name. The solution, then, is to come through the active
intervention of a divinity. Let us look at Athena's qualifications as a solver of the conflict that we
sketched above. How does she fit into a situation in which a dominant motif is the conflict of
mother-right and father-right? She is peculiarly fitted for this role: for, though female, she is not
born of a female: she sprang, the myth tells us, mature and fully armed from the brow of her
father Zeus, the dazzling god of the skies. Not for her is the emergence from the darkness of the
womb. Yet she is a woman, and the patroness of woman's crafts. Those who know the statue of
the Lemnian Athena as Furtwaengler reconstructed it will have a perfect picture of Athena as the
serene yet powerful embodiment of the beauty of the Greek intellect in feminine guise. What we
have then is the nearest approach to an impartial arbiter in the cosmic dispute: a female divinity
sprung solely from a male parent, an exponent of the masculine art of war who is also the
patroness of the feminine arts of the household; Our Lady of Battles who is also Our Lady of
Wisdom.

Yet it is deeply significant of the relationship between gods and men in the grand Greek tradition
that Athena does not attempt to judge the case unaided. She summons a court of human beings,
Athenians; they are to sit as judges on the hill of Ares, the Areopagus. It is the first supreme
court in Western Europe, and Athena's charge to it could stand as a clarion call to every tribunal
in the world (I use Lattimore's translation):

No anarchy, no rule of a single master. Thus

I advise my citizens to govern and to grace,

and not to cast fear utterly from your city. What

man who fears nothing at all is ever righteous? Such

be your just terrors, and you may deserve and have

salvation for your citadel, your land's defence,

such as is nowhere else found among men....

I establish this tribunal. It shall be untouched

by money-making, grave but quick to wrath, watchful

to protect those who sleep, a sentry on the land.

These words I have unreeled are for my citizens,

advice into the future. All must stand upright

now, take each man his ballot in his hand, think on

his oath, and make his judgment.

This charge comes after argument and counter-argument, rebuttal and sur-rebuttal, with the
Furies as plaintiffs, and Orestes as defendant, having Apollo as his mighty witness and attorney.
The argument is sophistic: Orestes admits the killing of his mother, but pleads Apollo's
command, and his obligation to his father. The Furies insist he will be condemned by the Court.
Why, says Orestes, did you not hound my mother for having killed my father? The Furies:
The man she killed was not of kindred blood. Orestes: Am I the blood-relative of my
mother? Yes, say the Furies, She nourished you within her body. No! interposes
Apollo; The mother is no parent; it is the father who is the parent, while the mother is merely
the fosterer of an implanted seed, an alien preserver of an alien spore. And here is proof that
there can be a father without a mother: my mighty evidence is the daughter of Olympian Zeus,
never nourished in the darkness of the womb!

The arguments are over. Athena speaks to render her judgment. She presumes, or perhaps
divinely foreknows, that the vote of the human judges will be a tie: in other words, that the
claims of father-right and of mother-right are so evenly matched that the mind of man, unaided
by divinity, could not reach a decision. And thus, before the ballots are counted, she casts the
President Justice's deciding vote for Orestes, saying frankly that, save for marriage, she is always
for the male, and strongly on her father's side. And now she orders the ballots counted: Orestes
calls out to the shining Apollo; the Furies summon the Darkness of Night, their Mother, to be
there to watch. The ballots are counted; they are equal for each side; the vote of Athena serves to
acquit Orestes. For Orestes and his protector Apollo, the action is over; they have won; they
depart. But what is in many ways the most dramatic part of the play is yet to come: the colloquy
between the defeated, bitter Furies and the gleaming Athena who has encompassed their fall.

For Athena does not regard a decision imposed from above as a complete solution; she embarks
with deep earnestness on what one of our social scientists has recently called the engineering of
consent, and what Athena later speaks of with affection as the eyes of Persuasion, which
guided my tongue and my mouth, when I addressed these wildly angry ones. I can do no better
in an attempt to communicate to you the quality of her persuasion than to quote you Lattimore's
translation of one portion of the colloquy: Orestes and Apollo have departed in triumph; the
Furies speak:

Gods of the younger generation, you have ridden down

the laws of the elder time, torn them out of my hands.

I disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger

shall let loose on the land

the vindictive poison

dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground;

this from itself shall breed

cancer, the leafless, the barren

to strike, for the right, their low lands

and drag its smear of mortal infection on the ground.

What shall I do? Afflicted

I am mocked by these people.

I have borne what can not

be borne. Great the sorrows and the dishonor upon

the sad daughters of night.

Athena answers:
Listen to me. I would not have you be so grieved.

For you have not been beaten. This was the result

of a fair ballot which was even. You were not

dishonored, but the luminous evidence of Zeus

was there, and he who spoke the oracle was he

who ordered Orestes so to act and not be hurt.

Do not be angry any longer with this land

nor bring the bulk of your hatred down on it, do not

render it barren of fruit, nor spill the dripping rain

of death in fierce and jagged lines to eat the seeds.

In complete honesty I promise you a place

of your own, deep hidden under ground that is

yours by right

where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth

to accept devotions offered by your citizens.

In the speech immediately following, Aeschylus has the Furies repeat their long tirade verbatim,
stubbornly, just as if Athena had not spoken at all. But Athena takes their intransigence calmly:
she says that she will bear their anger, for they are older than she, and thereby much wiser; yet,
says she, Zeus has given me too the ability to make no mean use of my brain. And so, in
different language, she repeats the substance of what we just heard her say. And this time the
Furies reply with a shorter outburst, still bitter, but shorter. They are becoming convinced, albeit
against their will. A reprise by Athena; they reply da capo with their shorter blast, again
verbatim. Athena paraphrases her rebuttal. And then: the unmistakable sign of the once-rigid
who will now yield. They cease to rant, and ask a question. Lady Athena, just what post do you
promise me? She patiently explains that they will be the guardians of Athenian marriage, in
which, we may observe, the mother-right and the father-right are conceived of as blended, not
separate and opposed. Without you no house will flourish. They say openly that they feel
themselves yielding; she encourages them further; they capitulate. Henceforth they will be the
Eumenides, the kindly-minded ones, protectors of the sanctity of the family hearth, protectors of
the City against internal strife. And as such they utter a prayer of deep significance:
This my prayer: Civil War

fattening on men's ruin shall

not thunder in our city. Let

not the dry dust that drinks

the black blood of citizens

through passion for revenge

and bloodshed for bloodshed

be given our state to prey upon.

Let them render grace for grace.

Let love be their common will;

let them hate with single heart.

Much wrong in the world thereby is healed.

The play closes with a recessional in which the women of Athens escort their newly-inaugurated
goddesses to their new abodes, welcoming them as the great, honored, aged children of Night,
who will abide in state in the dark recesses of the earth, venerated by the Athenians with
sacrificial rites. Chanting, all depart and clear the stage.

Let us reflect for one last moment on what has happened. Within the polity, the chain has at last
been broken: the chain of evil inflicted and evil repaid, only to lead to further infliction and
further repayment, has been brought to a close in an atmosphere of deep reconciliation. But only
within the polity: it is only the blood-feud between clans within the state, it is only civil war that
has been abrogated. Hatred between states is still envisaged as inevitable: all that is asked of
citizens is that they have the same friends and the same enemies. In other words, if we make
allowance a great allowance, to be sure for the growth of the city-state into a nation-state,
then Aeschylus has taken us as far as modern civilization has gone: to a situation in which the
society uses collective sanctions to protect citizen against citizen. But what of protecting state
against state? There I fear we remain where Aeschylus' Eumenides left us. We have tried feebly
and failed wretchedly to establish a world tribunal in which weak nation and strong nation may
be equal before the law. Where is mankind's Areopagus, the world's defense, untouched by
money-making, grave but quick to wrath, watchful to protect those who sleep, a sentry on the
Earth? a sentry on the Earth?
Source: Harry L. Levy, The Oresteia of Aeschylus, in Drama Survey, Vol. 4, Summer, 1965,
pp. 149-58. Reprinted in Drama Criticism, Vol. 8.

Source Database: Literature Resource Center