Lecture on the Oresteia
Ian Johnston
Vancouver Island University
[The following notes began
as a lecture delivered, in part, at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island
University) in Liberal Studies 301 on September 25, 1995. That lecture was
considerably revised in July 2000. This text is in the public domain, released
July 2000. For access to a free on-line translation of the Oresteia, follow this
link:
Oresteia.]
Introduction
My lecture today falls into two parts. In the first I
want to offer some background information for our study of Aeschylus’s
Oresteia, specifically on the Trojan War and the House of Atreus, and in
the second I will be addressing the first play in that trilogy, the
Agamemnon, making relatively brief mention of the other plays in the
trilogy. Other speakers today will focus in more detail on the second and third
plays.
The Trojan War
With the possible exception of the narratives in the
Old Testament, no story has been such a fecund artistic resource in Western
culture as the Greeks’ favourite tale, the Trojan War. This is a vast, complex
story, which includes a great many subsidiary narratives, and it has over the
centuries proved an inexhaustible resource for Western writers, painters,
musicians, choreographers, novelists, and dramatists. It would be comparatively
easy and very interesting to develop a course of study of Western Culture based
entirely upon artistic depictions of events from this long narrative. So it’s an
important part of cultural literacy for any students of our traditions to have
some acquaintance with the details of this story, which even today shows no sign
of losing its appeal.
There is not time here today to go into the narrative
in any depth. So I’m going to be dealing only with a very brief treatment of
those details most immediately pertinent to our study of Aeschylus. However, for
those who want to go over a more comprehensive summary of the total narrative, I
have put a few pages on the Internet (to access the site on line click on
Trojan War).
The complete narrative of the Trojan War includes at
least six sections: the long-term causes (the Judgment of Paris), the immediate
causes (the seduction of Helen of Troy by Paris), the preparations (especially
the gathering of the forces at Aulis and the sacrifice of Iphigeneia), the
events of the war (climaxing in the Wooden Horse and the destruction of the
city), the returns (most notably the adventures of Odysseus and Aeneas and the
murder of Agamemnon), and the long-term aftermath.
The total narrative is found by putting together many
different versions, not all of which by any means agree on the details. Unlike
the Old Testament narrative which was eventually codified into an official
single version (at least for Christians and Jews), the story of the Trojan War
exists in many versions of separate incidents in many different documents. There
is no single authoritative account. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
enjoyed a unique authority in classical Greece, but those works deal only with a
relatively small parts of the total narrative and are by no means the only texts
which deal with the subject matter they cover.
Was the Trojan War a historical event or an endlessly
embroidered fiction? The answer to this question is much disputed. The ancient
Greeks believed in the historical truth of the tale and dated it at
approximately 1200 BC (by our reckoning) about the same time as the Exodus of
the Israelites from Egypt. Until the last century, however, most later Europeans
thought of the story as a poetic invention. This attitude changed quickly when a
rich German merchant, Schliemann, in the nineteenth century, explored possible
sites for the city (using Homeric geography as a clue) and unearthed some
archeological remains of a city, one version of which had apparently been
violently destroyed at about the traditional date. The site of this city, in
Hissarlik in modern Turkey, is now widely believed to be the historical site of
ancient Troy (although we cannot be certain).
What we need to know as background for Aeschylus’s
play is a comparatively small portion of this total narrative, which Aeschylus
assumes his audience will be thoroughly familiar with. The expedition against
Troy was initiated as a response to the seduction of Helen by Paris, a son of
Priam, King of Troy, and their running off together back to Troy with a great
quantity of Spartan treasure. Helen, the daughter of Zeus and Leda, was married
to Menelaus, king of Sparta. His brother, Agamemnon, was king of Argos, married
to Helen’s twin sister Clytaemnestra (but whose father was not Zeus).
As a result of the abduction of Helen, the Greeks
mounted an expedition against Troy, headed up by the two kings, Agamemnon and
Menelaus, the sons of Atreus, or the Atreidai. They summoned their allies to
meet them with troops at Aulis, where the ships were to take the troops on board
and sail to Troy.
However, Agamemnon had angered the goddess Artemis by
killing a sacred animal. So Artemis sent contrary winds, and the fleet could not
sail. The entire expedition was threatened with failure. Finally, the prophet
Calchas informed the Greek leadership that the fleet would not be able to sail
unless Agamemnon sacrificed his eldest daughter, Iphigeneia. He did so, and the
fleet sailed to Troy, where, after ten years of siege, the city finally fell to
the Greeks, who then proceeded to rape, pillage, and destroy the temples of the
Trojans. The Greek leaders divided up the captive women. Agamemnon took
Cassandra, a daughter of king Priam, home as a slave concubine. Cassandra had
refused the sexual advances of the god Apollo; he had punished her by giving her
the gift of divine prophecy but making sure that no one ever believed her.
The moral construction put on the Trojan War varies a
good deal from one writer to the next. Homers Iliad, for example, sees
warfare as a condition of existence and therefore the Trojan War is a symbol for
life itself, a life in which the highest virtues are manifested in a tragic
heroism. In the Odyssey, there is a strong sense that the warrior life
Odysseus has lived at Troy is something he must learn to abandon in favour of
something more suited to home and hearth. Euripides used the stories of the war
to enforce either a very strong anti-war vision or to promote highly
unnaturalistic and ironic romance narratives.
In Aeschylus’s play there is a strong sense that the
Trojan War is, among other things, an appropriate act of revenge for the crime
of Paris and Helen against Menelaus. And yet, at the same time, it is something
which most of the people at home despise, for it kills young citizens and
corrupts political life by taking the leaders away. In fact, the complex
contradictions in the Chorus’s attitude to that war help to bring out one of the
major points of the first play: the problematic nature of justice based on a
simple revenge ethic. According to the traditional conception of justice,
Agamemnon is right to fight against Troy; but the effort is destroying his own
city. So how can that be right?
The House of Atreus
The other background story which Aeschylus assumes his
audience will be thoroughly familiar with is the story of the House of Atreus.
This story, too, is recounted in more detail in the note on the Trojan War
mentioned above.
The important point to know for the play is that the
House of Atreus suffers from an ancient curse. As part of the working out of
this curse, Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had quarreled violently with his brother
Thyestes. As a result of this quarrel, Atreus had killed Thyestes's sons and fed
them to him at a reconciliation banquet. In some versions of the story,
Thyestes, overcome with horror, produced a child with his surviving daughter in
order to have someone to avenge the crime. The offspring of that sexual union
was Aegisthus (Aeschylus changes this point by having Aegisthus an infant at the
time of the banquet). Aegisthus’s actions in the Oresteia, the
seduction of Clytaemnestra (before the play starts), and the killing of
Agamemnon, he interprets and excuses as a revenge for what Atreus did to his
father and brothers. (For a more detailed summary account of the story of the
House of Atreus, click
here).
The House of Atreus is probably the most famous
secular family in our literary history, partly because it tells the story of an
enormous family curse, full of sex, violence, horrible deaths going on for
generations. It also throws into relief a theme which lies at the very centre of
the Oresteia and which has intrigued our culture ever since, the nature of
revenge.
The Revenge Ethic
Aechylus’s trilogy, and especially the first play,
calls our attention repeatedly to a central concept of justice: justice as
revenge. This is a relatively simple notion, and it has a powerful emotional
appeal, even today. The revenge ethic, simply put, makes justice the personal
responsibility of the person insulted or hurt or, if that person is dead, of
someone closely related to him, almost invariably a close blood relative. The
killer must be killed, and that killing must be carried out personally by the
most appropriate person, who accepts that charge as an obvious responsibility.
It is a radically simple and powerfully emotional basis for justice, linking
retribution to the family and their feelings for each other and for their
collective honour.
We have already met this ethic in the Old Testament
and in the Odyssey. In the latter book, the killing of Aegisthus by
Orestes is repeatedly referred to with respect and approval: it was a just act
because Aegisthus had violated Orestes’s home and killed his father. And we are
encouraged to see Odysseus’s extraordinarily violent treatment of the suitors
and their followers as a suitable revenge, as justice, for what they have done
or tried to do to his household, especially his goods, his wife, and his son.
Justice demands a personal, violent, and effective response from an appropriate
family member.
And we are very familiar with this ethic from our own
times, because justice as revenge seems to be an eternally popular theme of
movies, televisions, and books. It has become an integral part of the Western
movie and of the police drama. Some actors create a career out of the genre
(e.g., Charles Bronson and Arnold Swartzenegger). We know from the news also
that many immigrants who come from countries where justice is widely understood
as revenge bring the ethic to this country and get into trouble because of it.
We may not ourselves base our justice system directly
and simply upon revenge, but we all understand very clearly those feelings which
prompt a desire for revenge (especially when we think of any violence done to
members of our own family), and we are often very sympathetic to those who do
decide to act on their own behalf in meting out justice to someone who has
killed someone near and dear to them.
So in reading the Oresteia we may be quite
puzzled by the rather strange way the story is delivered to us, but there is no
mistaking the importance or the familiarity of the issue. One way of approaching
this play, in fact, is to see it primarily as an exploration of the adequacy of
the revenge ethic as a proper basis for justice in the community and of the
movement towards a more civilized, effective, and rational way of judging crimes
in the polis.
An Important Preliminary Interlude
Before going on to make some specific remarks about
the Agamemnon, I'd like to call attention to an interpretative problem
that frequently (too frequently) crops up with the Oresteia, especially
among students, namely, the desire to treat this work as if it were, first and
foremost, a philosophical investigation into concepts of justice rather than a
great artistic fiction, a poetic exploration.
Why is this important? Well, briefly put, treating the
play as if it were a rational argument on the order of, say, a Socratic enquiry,
removes from our study of it the most important poetic qualities of the work. We
concentrate all our discussions on the conceptual dimensions of the play,
attending to the logic of Agamemnon’s defense of his actions, or Clytaemnestra’s
of hers, or the final verdict of Athena in the trial of Orestes at the end, and
we strive, above all, to evaluate the play on the basis of our response to the
rational arguments put forward.
This approach is potentially disastrous because the
Oresteia is not a rational argument. It is, by contrast, an artistic
exploration of conceptual issues. What matters here are the complex states of
feeling which emerge from the characters, the imagery, the actions, and the
ideas (as they are expressed by particular characters in the action). What we
are dealing with here, in other words, is much more a case of how human beings
feel about justice, about the possibilities for realizing justice in the fullest
sense of the word within the human community, rather than a rational blueprint
for implementing a new system.
I'll have more to say about this later, but let me
give just one famous example. The conclusion of the trilogy will almost
certainly create problems for the interpreter who seeks, above all else, a
clearly worked out rational system for achieving justice in the community
(understanding the rational justification for Athena’s decision in the trial or
the reconciliation with the Furies, for example, will be difficult to work out
precisely). But Aeschylus, as a poet, is not trying to offer such a conclusion.
What he gives us is a symbolic expression of our highest hopes, our most
passionate desires for justice (which is so much more than a simple objective
concept). The ending of the trilogy, with all those people (who earlier were
bitter opponents) on stage singing and dancing in harmony, is a celebration of
human possibility (and perhaps a delicate one at that), not the endorsement of a
clearly codified system.
In the same way Athena’s decision to acquit Orestes is
not primarily the expression of a reasoned argument. It is far more an artistic
symbol evocative of our highest hopes. This point needs to be stressed because
(for understandable reasons) this part of the play often invites a strong
feminist critique, as if what is happening here is the express desire to
suppress feminine power. Now, I would be the last to deny the importance of the
gendered imagery in the trilogy, but here I would also insist that Athena is a
goddess, and her actions are, in effect, endorsing a shift in power from the
divine to the human. Justice will no longer be a helpless appeal to the justice
of Zeus in a endless sequence of killings: it will be the highest responsibility
of the human community. The play does not prove that that’s a good idea. It
celebrates that as a possibility (and it may well be significant that that
important hope is realized on stage by a divine power who is female but who is
not caught up in the powerful nexus of the traditional family, since she sprung
fully grown from Zeus’s head).
This does not mean, I hasten to add, that we should
abandon our reason as we approach the play. It does mean, however, that we must
remain alert to the plays in the trilogy as works of art, and especially as
dramatic works, designed to communicate their insights to us in performance.
Yes, the plays deal with ideas, and we need to come to terms with those. But
these ideas are never separate from human desires, motives, and passions. To see
what Aeschylus is doing here, then, we need to look very carefully at all the
various ways in which this emotional dimension, the full range of ambiguity and
irony, establishes itself in the imagery, metaphors, and actions. We need, for
example, always to be aware of how the way characters express their thoughts
(especially the images they use) qualifies, complicates, and often undercuts the
most obvious meanings of their words.
You will get a firm sense of what I mean if you
consider that no one would ever put the Oresteia on a reading list for
a philosophy course (except perhaps as background). Yet the work obviously
belongs on any list of the world's great poetic dramas. We need to bear that in
mind in our discussions, basing what we say on close readings of the text rather
than on easy generalizations imposed on complex ironies.
Revenge in the Agamemnon
In the Agamemnon,
revenge is the central issue. Agamemnon interprets his treatment of Troy as
revenge for the crime of Paris and Helen; Clytaemnestra interprets her killing
of Agamemnon as revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigeneia; Aegisthus interprets
his role in the killing of Agamemnon as revenge for the treatment of his
half-brothers by Agamemnon's father, Atreus. We are constantly confronted in
this play with the realities of what revenge requires and what it causes, and we
are always being asked to evaluate the justification for killing by appeals to
the traditional revenge ethic.
But there’s more to it than that. For in this play,
unlike the Odyssey, revenge emerges as something problematic, something
that, rather than upholding and restoring the polis, is threatening to engulf it
in an unending cycle of destruction, until the most powerful city in the Greek
world is full of corpses and vultures. In fact, one of the principal purposes of
the first play of the trilogy is to force us to recognize that justice based on
revenge creates special difficulties which it cannot solve. To use one of the
most important images in the play, the city is caught in a net from which there
seems to be no escape. The traditional revenge ethic has woven a cycle of
necessary destruction around the city, and those caught in the mesh feel trapped
in a situation they do not want but cannot alter.
The Chorus in the Agamemnon
The major way in which Aeschylus presents revenge to
us as a problem in the Agamemnon is through the actions and the
feelings of the Chorus. For us the huge part given to the Chorus is unfamiliar,
and we may be tempted from time to time to skip a few pages until the next
person enters, and the action moves forward. That is a major mistake, because
following what is happening to the Chorus in the Agamemnon is essential
to understanding the significance of what is going on. They provide all sorts of
necessary background information, but, more important than that, they set the
emotional and moral tone of the city. What they are, what they say, and how they
feel represent the quality of life (in the full meaning of that term) available
in the city.
First of all, who are these people? They are adult
male citizens of Argos, those who ten years ago were too old to join the
expedition to Troy. Hence, they are extremely old and very conscious of their
own physical feebleness. And they are worried. They know the history of this
family; they know very well about the sacrifice of Iphigeneia and about
Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra; and they have a very strong sense of what is about
to happen once Agamemnon returns. They are full of an ominous sense of what is
in store, and yet they have no means of dealing with that or even talking about
it openly. Thus, in everything they say until quite near the end of the play,
there is a very strong feeling of moral evasiveness: Agamemnon is coming home,
and justice awaits. They know what that means. It is impossible to read very
much of those long choruses without deriving a firm sense of their unease at
what is going to happen and of their refusal and inability to confront directly
the sources of that unease.
Why should this create problems for them? Well, they
are caught in something of a dilemma. On the one hand, the only concept of
justice they understand is the traditional revenge ethic: the killer must be
killed. At the same time, they are weary of the slaughter. They are fearful for
the future of their city, since the revenge ethic is destroying its political
fabric. And they do not approve of what Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus are up to.
They may sense that there's a certain justice in the revenge for Iphigeneia, but
they are not satisfied that that is how things should be done, because
Agamemnon, or someone like him, is necessary for the survival of the city.
In that sense their long account of the sacrifice of
Iphigeneia is much more than simply narrative background. They are probing the
past, searching through the sequence of events, as if somehow the justice of
what has happened will emerge if they focus on the history which has led up to
this point. But the effort gets them nowhere, and they are left with the
desperately weak formulaic cry, “Sing out the song of sorrow, song of grief,/
but let the good prevail,” a repetitive prayer expressing a slim hope for a
better future. They don’t like what's happened in the past, but they cannot come
to a mature acceptance of it, because it scares them. The actions of Agamemnon
seem to fit the concept of justice, as they understand the term, but the actions
themselves are horrific. They want it to make sense, but they cannot themselves
derive any emotional satisfaction from the story or from what they suspect will
happen next.
Thus, everything they utter up to the murder of
Agamemnon is filled with a sense of moral unease and emotional confusion. They
want the apparently endless cycle of retributive killings to stop, but they have
no way of conceptualizing or imagining how that might happen. Their historical
circumstances are too emotionally complex for the system of belief they have at
hand to interpret the significance of those events. Since the only system of
justice they have ever known tells them that the killings must continue and
since they don’t want them to continue, they are paralyzed. The physical
weakness throughout much of the play is an obvious symbol for their moral and
emotional paralysis. In fact, the most obvious thing about Argos throughout this
first play is the moral duplicity and evasiveness of everyone in it.
This moral ambiguity of Argos manifests itself
repeatedly in the way the Chorus and others refuse to reveal publicly what they
are thinking and feeling. Right from the very opening of the play, in the
Watchman’s speech, what is for a brief moment an outburst of spontaneous joy at
the news that Agamemnon will be returning is snuffed out with a prudent
hesitancy and an admission that in Argos one does not dare utter one's thoughts.
As the Watchman says in the first speech of the play, “As for all the rest, I’m
saying nothing./ A great ox stands on my tongue. But this house,/ if it could
speak, might tell some stories.”
The way in which the watchman’s joy is instantly
tempered by his guarded suspicion indicates, right at the very opening of the
play, that we are in a murky realm here, where people are not free to state what
they feel, where one feeling cancels out another, and where there’s no sense of
what anyone might do to resolve an unhappy situation.
It’s important to note here that the political inertia
of the old men of the chorus is not a function of their cowardice or their
stupidity. They are neither of these. It comes from a genuine sense of moral and
emotional confusion. As mentioned above, in order to understand their situation
they are constantly reviewing the past, bringing to our attention the nature of
the warfare in Troy (which they hate), the terrible destruction caused by Helen
(whom they despise), the awful sacrifice of Iphigeneia (for whom they express
great sympathy), and so on. The moral code they have inherited tells them that,
in some way or another, all these things are just. But that violates their
feelings. Revenge, they realize, is not achieving what justice in the community
is supposed, above all else, to foster, a secure and fair life in the polis, an
emotional satisfaction with our communal life together. On the contrary, it is
destroying Argos and will continue to do so, filling its citizens with fear and
anxiety.
This attitude reaches its highest intensity in the
interview they have with Cassandra. She unequivocally confronts them with their
deepest fears: that they will see Agamemnon dead. Their willed refusal to admit
that they understand what she is talking about is not a sign of their
stupidity--they know very well what she means. But they cannot admit that to
themselves, because then they would have to do something about it, and they have
no idea what they should or could do. If they do nothing, then perhaps the
problem will go away. Maybe Agamemnon can take care of it. Or, put another way,
before acting decisively, they need a reason to act. But the traditional reasons
behind justice are telling them that they have no right to intervene.
The situation does not go away of course. Agamemnon is
killed, and Clytaemnestra emerges to deliver a series of triumphant speeches
over his corpse. It is particularly significant to observe what happens to the
Chorus of old men at this point. They have no principled response to
Clytaemnestra, but they finally are forced to realize that what has just
happened is, in some fundamental way, a violation of what justice in the polis
should be all about, and that they therefore should not accept it. And this
emotional response rouses them to action: for the first time they openly defy
the rulers of the city, at some risk to themselves. They have no carefully
worked out political agenda, nor can they conceptualize what they are doing.
Their response is radically emotional: the killing of the king must be wrong.
Civil war is averted, because Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus do not take up the
challenge, retiring to the palace. But the end of the Agamemnon leaves us with
the most graphic image of a city divided against itself. What has gone on in the
name of justice is leading to the worst of all possible communal disasters,
civil war, the most alarming manifestation of the total breakdown of justice.
This ending is, in part, not unlike the ending of the
Odyssey, where Odysseus’s revenge against the suitors initiates a civil
war between him and his followers and those whose duty it is to avenge the
slain. But Homer does not pursue the potential problem of justice which this
poses. Instead he wraps the story up quickly with a divine intervention, which
forcibly imposes peace on the antagonists. We are thus not invited to question
the justice of Odysseus's actions, which in any case have divine endorsement
throughout.
In Aeschylus's first play, by contrast, the problems
of a city divided against itself by the inadequacy of the revenge ethic become
the major focus of the second and third plays, which seek to find a way through
the impasse.
Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra
In contrast to the moral difficulties of the Chorus,
the two main characters in the Agamemnon, Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra,
have no doubts about what justice involves: it is based upon revenge. And the
two of them act decisively in accordance with the old ethic to destroy those
whom the code decrees must be destroyed, those whom they have a personal
responsibility to hurt in the name of vengeance for someone close to them.
Now, in accordance with that old revenge code, both of
them have a certain justification for their actions (which they are not slow to
offer). But Aeschylus’s treatment of the two brings out a very important
limitation of the revenge ethic, namely the way in which it is compromised by
the motivation of those carrying out justice.
For in spite of their enmity for each other, Agamemnon
and Clytaemnestra have some obvious similarities. They live life to satisfy
their own immediate desires for glory and power, and to gratify their immoderate
passions, particularly their blood lust. Whatever concerns they have for the
polis take second place to the demands of their own passionate natures. They do
not suffer the same moral anguish as the Chorus because they feel powerful
enough to act on how they feel and because their very strong emotions about
themselves are not in the slightest tempered by a sense of what is best for the
city or for anyone else. Their enormously powerful egos insist that they do not
have to attend to anyone else’s opinion (the frequency of the personal pronouns
“I,” “me,” “mine,” and “my” in their speech is really significant). They answer
only to themselves.
More than this, the way in which each of the two main
characters justifies the bloody revenge carried out in the name of justice
reveals very clearly that they revel in blood killing. Shedding blood with a
maximum of personal savagery, without any limit, gratifies each of them
intensely, so much so that their joy in destruction calls into question their
veracity in talking of themselves as agents of justice.
This is so pronounced a feature of these heroic
figures that the play puts a certain amount of pressure on us to explore their
motivation. They both claim they act in order to carry out justice. But do they?
What other motives have come into play? When Agamemnon talks of how he
obliterated Troy or walks on the red carpet or Clytaemnestra talks with delight
about what a sexual charge she is going to get by making love to Aegisthus on
top of the dead body of Agamemnon, we are surely invited to see that, however
much they justify their actions with appeals to divine justice, their motivation
has become very muddied with other, less noble motives.
Such observations may well occasion some dispute among
interpreters. But in order to address them we need to pay the closest possible
attention to the language and the motivation of these characters (as that is
revealed in the language), being very careful not to accept too quickly the
justifications they offer for their own actions. We need to ask ourselves
repeatedly: On the basis of the language, how am I to understand the reasons why
Agamemnon killed Iphigeneia and wiped out Troy? Why does Clytaemnestra so enjoy
killing Agamemnon? If a disinterested sense of justice is all that is in play
here, they why does she so enjoy killing Cassandra? Why, for that matter, does
Agamemnon talk about the total destruction of Troy with such grim pleasure? Why
does he get so much joy in talking about how he is going to bring justice back
to Argos with a sword?
And this, I take it, is for Aeschylus a very important
limitation on the revenge ethic. It brings into play concerns which have, on the
face of it, no immediate connections with justice and everything to do with much
baser human instincts. People like Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, who claim (after
the fact) to kill in the name of justice, actually are carrying out the
destruction to satisfy much deeper, more urgent, and far less worthy human urges
(a fact which may account for the fact that in their killing they go to excess,
well beyond the strict demands of justice).
For that reason, Aeschylus gives us a very close look
at the characters of Clytaemnestra and Agamemnon. As I say, we need to pay the
closest attention to their language, trying to get a handle, not just on the
surface details of what they are saying, but on the emotional complexities of
the character uttering the lines. We need to ask ourselves the key question: In
acting the way they do and for the reasons they state or reveal to us in their
language, are they being just? Or is their sense of justice merely a patina
covering something else? Or are both possibilities involved?
For instance, Clytaemnestra states that she killed
Agamemnon in order to avenge Iphigeneia. Is that true? If it is a reason, how
important is it? What else is involved here? In the second play, she confronts
Orestes with this justification. But what is our response right at the moment
after she has just done the deed? One needs here not merely to look at what she
says but at how she says it. What particular emotions is she revealing in her
style of speech and what do these reveal about her motives?
Such questions become all the more important when we
compare how they set about their acts of “justice” with the opening of the
second play, when we see Orestes return to carry out the next chapter in the
narrative of the House of Atreus. For there’s a really marked difference between
his conduct and that of his parents. A great deal of the second play is taken up
with Orestes’s preparations to carry out his vision of justice. It’s not
unimportant that much of that time he’s questioning himself, seeking advice from
others, involving others publicly in what he feels he has to do. In a sense, he
is trying to purge himself of those emotions which drive Agamemnon and
Clytaemnestra to their acts of “justice,” to make himself an agent of divine
justice rather than serving his own blood-lust.
This, I take it, is a key element in Aeschylus's
treatment of the theme of justice. So long as the revenge ethic rests in the
hands of people like Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, tragically passionate egotists
who answer only to their own immediate desires, the cycle of killing will go on
for ever, and cities will destroy themselves in the blood feud. The only way out
(and it is a hope) is that someone like Orestes will act out of a love of
justice as a divine principle, setting aside as best he can (or even acting
against) his deepest, most irrational blood feelings, thus moving beyond the
revenge ethic.
We will get little sense of why Orestes deserves to be
declared innocent unless we attend very carefully to the difference between his
motives and those of his parents, for it is surely an important element in
Athena's final judgment that the traditional revenge ethic, as embodied in the
Furies and manifested in the conduct of Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, and Aegisthus,
is no longer compatible with justice in the community and that Orestes’s actions
in killing his mother are, as much as he can make them, undertaken in the
service of others (Apollo and the community), rather than stemming from a
passionate blood-lust (the fact that Orestes is willing to stand trial and abide
by the verdict is one important sign of the difference between him and his
parents).
A Final Postscript
Human beings think about justice as a rational concept, institutionalized in their communities, but they also have strong emotions about justice, both within the family and the community. The revenge ethic harnessed to those powerful feelings in Aechylus’s play stands exposed as something that finally violates our deepest sense of any possibility for enduring justice in our community, for it commits us a never-ending cycle of retributive killing and over-killing.
The Oresteia ends with a profound and very
emotionally charged hope that the community can move beyond such a personally
powerful emotional basis for justice and, with the sanction of the divine forces
of the world, establish a system based on group discussion, consensus, juries
(through what Athena calls persuasion)--in a word, can unite a conceptual,
reasonable understanding of justice with our most powerful feelings about it.
This work is, as Swinburne observed, one of the most optimistic visions of human
life ever written, for it celebrates a dream we have that human beings in their
communities can rule themselves justly, without recourse to blood vengeance,
satisfying mind and heart in the process.
At the same time, however, Aeschylus is no shallow
liberal thinker telling us to move beyond our brutal and unworkable traditions.
For he understands that we cannot by some sleight of hand remove the Furies from
our lives. They are ancient goddesses, eternally present. Hence, in the
conclusion of the play the Furies, traditional goddesses of vengeance, are
incorporated into the justice system, not excluded. And the powers they are
given are significant: no city can thrive without them. Symbolically, the
inclusion of the Furies in the final celebration, their new name (meaning “The
Kindly Ones”), and their agreement fuse in a great theatrical display elements
which were in open conflict only a few moments before.
It’s as if the final image of this play stresses for
us that in our justice we must strive to move beyond merely personal emotion
(the basis of personal revenge) towards some more reasonable group
deliberations, but in the new process we must not violate our personal feelings
or forget they have their role to play. If justice is to be a matter of
persuasion, it cannot violate the deepest feelings we have (and have always had)
about justice. If such violation takes place, the city will not thrive.
Every time I read the conclusion of this great
trilogy, I think of how we nowadays may well have lost touch with that great
insight: that justice is not just a matter of reasonable process and debate but
also a matter of feeling. For a city to thrive justice must not only be
reasonably done but must be felt to be done. Once our system starts to violate
our feelings for justice, our city does not thrive. The Furies will see to that.