The scope and object of the
Oresteia is simply huge. Prior to Dante's
Commedia, perhaps no other literary work sounded the matter of Justice to such depths. Its relevance to the survival of the
polis in ancient Greece and its occurrence in aftertimes is unending.
From the beginning of
Eumenides, Orestes is in crisis:
Πυθιάς
ἐγὼ μὲν ἕρπω πρὸς πολυστεφῆ μυχόν:
40ὁρῶ δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ὀμφαλῷ μὲν ἄνδρα θεομυσῆ
ἕδραν ἔχοντα προστρόπαιον, αἵματι
στάζοντα χεῖρας καὶ νεοσπαδὲς ξίφος
ἔχοντ᾽ ἐλαίας θ᾽ ὑψιγέννητον κλάδον,
λήνει μεγίστῳ σωφρόνως ἐστεμμένον,
45ἀργῆτι μαλλῷ: τῇδε γὰρ τρανῶς ἐρῶ.
Pythia, Priestess of Apollo
I was on my way to the inner shrine, decked with wreaths; I saw on the center-stone a man defiled in the eyes of the gods, [40] occupying the seat of suppliants. His hands were dripping blood; he held a sword just drawn and an olive-branch, from the top of the tree, decorously crowned with a large tuft of wool, a shining fleece; for as to this I can speak clearly. [45]
In this frozen image, Orestes sits at the fulcrum of the Earth. A suppliant at the Omphalos, he holds the sword with which he killed his mother in one hand, and a "high-born" olive branch wrapped in a shining tuft of wool in the other.
Orestes has come at the direction of Apollo; the hideous Erinyes sit sleeping a few feet away. They are at the Earth's center. How will this portentous balance tip? More than just one mortal's fate clearly is at stake here.
In describing the Furies, the priestess of Apollo speaks of their resemblance to the Harpies she once saw in an image that depicted the filthy bird/women afflicting
Phineus. As tempting as it is to explore this allusion in detail (all allusions in Aeschylus fascinate), suffice to say Phineus' tale is another royal house horror show. Thanks to his second wife's lies, he either blinds, entombs, or has his two sons killed; he in turn is blinded and daily endures the Harpies' despoliation of his food.
The priestess's description of the Erinyes smacks of Apollonian taste. Unlike the winged Harpies,
these are wingless in appearance, black, altogether disgusting (πᾶν βδελύκτροποι); they snore with repulsive breaths, they drip from their eyes hateful drops; their attire is not fit to bring either before the statues of the gods or into the homes of men. [55]
The word Smyth translates as "disgusting" is
βδελύκτροποι -- it's more a "turning into a loathing for food" - Sommerstein has "nauseating." Thyestian echoes abound.
Treacherous husbands and wives lead to destroyed children -- such tales might lead us to question the sustainability of the
oikos. Whatever may be the case with the Harpies, the Erinyes, however nauseating, are not "evil." They do the dirty work of vengeance in a world populated by autocratic Houses that owe allegiance to no one, unless they happen to believe in the gods.
If Orestes on first view appears torn between nauseous vengeance and a high born peace, this is not new. Royal houses are scenes of horrific actions and reactions arising from the capacity of humans to err. For the Greeks, humans have godlike minds and lizard spines -- split natures that make for great stories, but no universal power of Evil is at work. Neither Satan nor Calvin is on offer here.
At the end of the
Oresteia, the women, children and Furies of Athens dance out of the theater (on the path of good speech) to the Areopagus. There, where Amazons once nearly took down Theseus and his city, the Erinyes will dwell at a glowing hearth within Ares' rock. The fulcrum of the play's opening has now tipped toward the olive branch.
Is there something further the play tells us about how this portentous turn takes place? Are we persuaded that we understand what Athena means by Persuasion?
I'm not sure. Here's a strictly hypothetical stab at it:
The structure of
Eumenides is designed to go beyond logic, reasoned argument, silky rhetoric and legal citation. The institution of Justice only works if all parties -- including the agents of vengeance -- accept something more basic than Reason. To accept, they must understand the power to choose; to reach that understanding, they first must have standing.
One way to look at it: Orestes stands between bloody vengeance and the olive. But it's not about his turning from one to the other -- it's about a turning of vengeance and the olive until they are both on the same side of Orestes.
This re-positioning, or superpositioning of Furies and Citizens, gives them each the power to choose.
For Aeschylus, Persuasion can occur suddenly and wholly, changing the world.
Peithous makes that which is unlike what one believes into the reality one cannot disbelieve.
The play's skein of images involving dreaming and waking, image and reality, figure and substance present the performative effect of Persuasion in phenomenal terms.
The first moment we "see" the Furies comes through the eyes of the Priestess: even asleep they're hideous. Then the former Queen of Argus tries to wake them to avenge her murder, but she herself is part of the dream, and vanishes in their awakening. Clytemnestra has no "standing" outside of the dream she is desperate to disrupt.
When Athena arrives at her temple and sees the Furies and Orestes, she notices the suppliant holding the hallowed wooden image of herself. She compares him to Ixion (the text is unclear as to whether Athena says the young man is like Ixion, or unlike him, but it's moot here).
The allusion is to a notorious suppliant driven insane after murdering his father in law. Ixion came to Zeus and was purified. In gratitude he sought to cuckold the Father of Gods and Men, but Zeus saw him coming a mile away. The scapegrace bedded a cloud that looked like Hera, and begat the race of Centaurs, the Ixionidae. Then he got affixed to his ever-turning wheel.
Regardless of what Athena meant by her Ixion reference, what matters is that Orestes goes from holding a wooden image to addressing the goddess. Where Clytemnestra dwindled from murderous Queen to dream image, the statue her murderer clings to brings Athena, who helps restore him to a lordly life.
Clytemnestra is a signifier within a system of signifiers, a dream. Athena, coming from outside, is the substantial referent of the wooden signifier. Their totally different standings lead to distinctly contrary outcomes of their efforts at persuasion. One instantly vanishes; the other achieves the crucial persuasive act that resolves the crisis of
Eumenides.
One would expect Athena's decisive act of persuasion would bear the hallmarks of an unforgettable oration worthy of St. Crispin's Day. Yet as we have seen, the prose exchange in which Athena and the Furies work out their deal stands out precisely for its flat style, spliced between the high strains of tragic
kommos that precede and follow.
Within the genre of tragic verse, to sound like "everyday" is to sound like how people talk when they are not in a play -- the vernacular of now. This "modern" scene in the
Oresteia is not something that happens as a sequel to an archaic "before." Rather, consonant with its root sense, modern now means "now," when '"now"' is any moment not under the theatrical spell of the archaic.
Think of the citizen assembly. It's not some enchanted event set to rhythm and sung -- it's the ordinary speech of the process of democracy. Yet, says Athena,
ἀλλ᾽ ἐκράτησε Ζεὺς ἀγοραῖος: (973)
but Zeus of the assembly has prevailed.
Consider the issue between Athena and the Furies as posing a choice of genre -- do we stay in the archaic song of automated blood vengeance, or leave it behind?To leave is to wake into the now of modernity. It may happen in an instant, and in fact does so when
Eumenides suddenly drops from the
sturm und drang of its heightened
kommos to the prose parley of Athena and the Furies.
Beginning with line 881 the entire play steps out of its powerful rhythms, emotions and furious mythic violence into prosaic modernity and negotiated choices. (More on that scene
here.)
When Athena expresses gratitude to Persuasion (whether goddess or facility of language), she says:
στέργω δ᾽ ὄμματα Πειθοῦς,
ὅτι μοι γλῶσσαν καὶ στόμ᾽ ἐπωπᾷ
πρὸς τάσδ᾽ ἀγρίως ἀπανηναμένας:
I am grateful to Persuasion, that her eyes kept watch over my tongue and mouth, when I encountered their fierce rejections. (Eum. 970-72)
Thanks to watchful Persuasion, the goddess chooses civil forebearance.There is no coercion of divine power, no magic spell, no shock associated with peripeteia, yet there is no question her momentous equanimity turns into the decisive act of
Eumenides. It doesn't seem irresponsible to define what she achieves here as a de-theatricalization of the tragic sublime. The choice is no longer Bloody Sword or Olive Branch -- one chooses the new complex entity comprised of both.
The Furies sing:
δέξομαι Παλλάδος ξυνοικίαν
I will join the house of Pallas (Eum. 916),
The "house of Pallas" now is altogether different from the archaic
oikos. To the extent her citizens model wisdom, the goddess of the play and the people of the House of Pallas coincide. Erasing the "fourth wall," the sign we name the
Oresteia points beyond itself to the
polis, godlike so long as it can be
κερδῶν ἄθικτον τοῦτο βουλευτήριον,
αἰδοῖον, ὀξύθυμον, εὑδόντων ὕπερἐγρηγορὸς φρούρημα γῆς καθίσταμαι.
. . . untouched by greed, worthy of reverence, quick to anger, awake on behalf of those who sleep, a guardian of the land. (Eum. 704-06)
Together the
Oresteia's cast and audience pour joyously into the streets of everyday Athens. Their eyes turn to regard the face of the fury.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin.⠀
