What are you doing? A failed scene of persuasion in Eumenides

Why does Aeschylus put the task of persuasion at the climax of the Oresteia?

That scene between Athena and the Furies brings about the truce, (σπονδή) that ends the trilogy, and offers what could be called Aeschylus's theatrical vision of wisdom in action. Certain aspects of Athena's dialog with the Furies might be put in relief if compared with the earlier, balancing scene of Clytemnestra exhorting the Furies (l. 94 ff).

An image of the dead Clytemnestra enters and finds the Furies dreaming of pursuing Orestes. An outcast from even the dead, the Queen calls on the hounds of Night to destroy her son, Orestes, who until this moment in fact stood right in front of them.

She begins with sarcastic contempt:

Phantom (εἴδωλον) of Clytemnestra 

εὕδοιτ᾽ ἄν, ὠή, καὶ καθευδουσῶν τί δεῖ;95 

ἐγὼ δ᾽ ὑφ᾽ ὑμῶν ὧδ᾽ ἀπητιμασμένη 

ἄλλοισιν ἐν νεκροῖσιν,

Sleep on! Aha! Yet what need is there of sleepers? It is due to you that I am thus dishonored among the other dead;

As they mutter in their shadowy dogdream, Clytemnestra tries to wake them to consciousness of the fact they are dreaming, and that Orestes has escaped: 

Phantom of Clytemnestra 

ὄναρ διώκεις θῆρα, κλαγγαίνεις δ᾽ ἅπερκύων μέριμναν οὔποτ᾽ ἐκλείπων πόνου. 

τί δρᾷς; 

In a dream you are hunting your prey, and are barking like a dog that never leaves off its keenness for the work.  

What are you doing?

The irony here is almost dizzying. The image (εἴδωλον) of the dead mother is trying to get the Furies to see her living son standing before their eyes at Delphi's Omphalos. Trapped in the stasis of their dream, they just mutter more loudly, pursuing Orestes' image. Instead of disrupting their dream, the eidolon of Clytemnestra gets inscribed in it -- a new image to mutter at in their dream.

When Clytemnestra asks τί δρᾷς; What are you doing?, the question is rhetorical. She is underscoring the failure of the Furies to act.

But suppose, observing Clytemnestra, one were to take τί δρᾷς; literally, and ask: What are YOU doing, O Queen? Her straining to persuade, to move the Furies to action in her pursuit of "honor," has utterly failed. She's not doing anything, vanishing the instant they awaken. If anything, she proves to be more delusional than the objects of her sarcasm.

As I hope to indicate in a further post, the irony of Clytemnestra's failure becomes even clearer when juxtaposed with the final scene. Athena will succeed in moving the Furies -- not to hunt Orestes, but to leave the only dream they've known, these children of Night, for a new stage, in a new theater of operations -- the polis.

Clytemnestra seeking to awaken the Furies

The path of good speech

Near the final lines of Eumenides, Athena asks 

Athena

ἆρα φρονοῦσιν γλώσσης ἀγαθῆς

ὁδὸν εὑρίσκειν;

ἐκ τῶν φοβερῶν τῶνδε προσώπων

μέγα κέρδος ὁρῶ τοῖσδε πολίταις:   988-991

Do they not then intend to find
the path of good speech?
From these terrible faces
I see great profit for these citizens;

The goddesss has pretty much sealed the deal with the Erinyes. Right after this speech, the priestess and various attendants enter, bringing sacrificial animals, torches, purple robes and young temple servants. The chorus of Furies sings χαίρετε χαίρετ᾽ -- "Rejoice rejoice" together with a sense of "Farewell" -- as they are about to take the path to their new house in a deep, large cavern nearby.

Our group started the Agamemnon in September 2018, and we read the last lines of Eumenides Wednesday. I would happily echo the Furies' χαίρετε χαίρετ᾽ even as I admit that the scope of Aeschylus' achievement warrants an instant return to Ag. line 1. Even for our intrepid group that would be a bit of a challenge.

Short of that, however, any effort on my part to write about the Oresteia probably won't amount to much. Instead of a "close reading" of this mountainous work, I'll address one question that might prove useful as a point of entry -- simply this: The last "act" of Eumenides -- from the moment an acquitted Orestes leaves the courtroom until the entire cast dances off the stage -- consists of a single act of persuasion. Nearly a quarter of the play's length, it has the Furies turn away from their ancient ways to be welcomed into the heart of Athens.

Everything Athena (along with Apollo, Hermes, the Pythia) has done to put in place a civic judicial form is only effected if these ancient hags can accept Athena's deal. Yet the scene often receives relatively short shrift, with more attention given to the courtroom scene that precedes it.

Mainly Athena and the Furies square off after the humans and other gods have left. The Erinyes remain Furious that their age-old mission to torment the killer of a blood relative, in this case a matricide, has been aborted. Without some coming to terms, the stability of Dike, the judicial mechanism of a juried trial established by the Goddess, is unstable.

This in itself is noteworthy. The new Court of the Areopagus is not a fait accompli, the result of irresistible divine power. Its very possibility depends upon a coming to terms with the Furies.

How do you win over a creature of Night that only knows how to inflict vengeful pursuit, rampant plague and infinite pain? How do you convince it to "find the path to good speech?" And in these elemental hideous faces, associated with cruel butchery and torture as Apollo had described with vehement disgust, what prompts Athena to "see great profit for these citizens?"

I'll try to make some headway in a couple of upcoming posts.

Birth of Athena

Background on Oikos and Polis from Ryan Stitt

Ryan Stitt's series of podcasts entitled A History of Ancient Greece is now on its 99th post. I've listened to several posts -- maybe a couple of dozen -- and found each to be full of observant detail, and rewarding for the clarity that comes with simply reporting on how these people saw the world. (I've come to believe that if we all spoke Athenian Greek, we'd be spared a world of confusion.)

After skipping around I've now gone back to the beginning. Two posts I've just been listening to offer superb background as we turn to The Eumenides. If nothing else, the Oresteia is a panorama that begins on the rooftop of a king's house and ends in the public space of Athens, where Justice is performed.

The two I have in mind are:

From Oikos to Polis - Stitt traces the key transition from the world of Homer and the "dark ages" of the ancient world to the beginnings of the civic realm fully realized a few centuries in Athens, Corinth, and other cities.

Oligarchs and Hesiod - Continuing with the economic and demographic underpinnings of the transition, and its reflection in the poetry of Hesiod.

These podcasts are freely available through many channels -- Spotify, TuneIn, YouTube, Pandora -- and more. A list is available in the right column of his blog, which offers supplementary materials - links, images, scholarly studies for each podcast.

Declassifying ancient Greece

Here's a podcast to which to have a listen:

Ancient Greece Declassified. A set of interviews of field experts in ancient Greece, conducted by Dr. Lantern Jack. No idea if that's his actual monicker. I've just listened to two good discussions:

12: The Comedy of Democracy with Edith Hall - a witty, wise British classicist who presents her view of Aristophanes's work and its relation to the polis.

06: What is Greek Tragedy? with Rush Rehm - thoughtful overview with a Stanford prof who has directed Greek plays.

Hall, Fo, and theatrics of role and story

I'm reading a group of essays by Edith Hall concerned with Athenian theater, and came upon this:

In the twentieth century, theatrical roles became a notoriously
politicized issue. At the Moscow Art Theatre a hundred years ago,
Constantin Stanislavski focused on the actor’s conviction in the
naturalistic realization of a role. But his critics always urged that
this school produced self-regarding actors, who erected a wall be-
tween themselves and the voyeuristic audience: quintessentially
bourgeois theatre. Brecht insisted that the actor destroy the role
in order to present it as a manufactured entity, enabling the maintenance of critical distance. And for Dario Fo, acting means ‘recounting’: the actor must find the story rather than the character. Fo has urged that inherent in ‘the people’ is a collective dimension different from the individualizing tendencies of the bourgeoisie; this consciousness is supposedly expressed in ‘popular’ entertainment
forms that require actors to enter into dialogue with the audience,
rather than to display themselves for inspection.

The above is from Hall's The Theatrical Cast of Athens, chapter 1, where she addresses the question of which is primary, role (character) or story (plot). Hall's frame of reference is wide, and reflects decades of attention to the theater of Athens and well beyond. (And I'm grateful that she posted a free digital version of her book to Academia.edu).

I especially like her inclusion of Fo, whose Mistero Buffo I was privileged to witness in Florence in 1973.

Words fail to convey what Fo, using a public street, did there. To adapt Hall's mini-taxonomy (because it helps), one might describe it as Fo's finding a way to combine the vivid individuation of Stanislavski with an overlay of gestures, expressions and comments aimed to include the spectators in the scene. This connection opened the "fourth wall" (parabasis) to us, reminding us of both our genre awareness as an educated audience, as well as of the distance of history. We were at once the captive crowd on the streets of medieval Fireneze or Siena, and the 20th century latecomers, acutely conscious of the "collective dimension" undreamt of without the dialogic mimesis of Fo's genius.

Dario Fo

.

British Museum to revisit Troy this fall

The legend of Troy has endured for thousands of years – an epic tale of conflict, passion and tragedy. Tread the line between myth and reality in our major autumn show. #Troy Myth and Reality opens 21 November.

On this Athenian drinking cup Achilles sits withdrawn and angry inside his tent,
heavily wrapped in his cloak, as two heralds lead away his prize, the enslaved woman Briseis. 

We demand accountability from politicians. We should demand it from voters, too.

from the Washington Post

By Matthew A. Sears

Matthew A. Sears is an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick.

May 20 2019

Government accountability is an idea that draws bipartisan support: calls for more transparency and oversight of politicians and bureaucracies go over well with voters. But what about oversight of the people who put them in office? Democracies give power to the people — does anyone hold the people responsible for this power?

Not really, and that has long been a problem. Since its beginning in ancient Greece, democracy has faced a crisis of legitimacy when the people have not been held accountable for their exercise of sovereignty, allowing elites to dismiss democracy as mob rule. Today, defending our democracy begins with taking responsibility for votes cast at the ballot box each year.

Those discontented with democracy in Classical Athens certainly thought that the people, demos in Greek, did not often take responsibility for their exercise of power, or kratos (the two words from which we get demokratia — “people power”). As a consequence, many of the most famous and influential ancient sources on Greek politics can be read as decidedly anti-democratic.

Thucydides — the historian of the Peloponnesian War, and an exiled elite who was no fan of democracy — criticized the people after Athens suffered horrendous losses in Sicily in 413 B.C.: “The people were angry with the politicians who had urged the expedition, as if they themselves hadn’t voted in favor of it.”

more here. . . 

The death of King Agamemnon

πολλῶν πάροιθεν καιρίως εἰρημένων 
τἀναντί᾽ εἰπεῖν οὐκ ἐπαισχυνθήσομαι.  

Much have I said before to serve my need 
and I shall feel no shame to contradict it now.  1372-73

These are the opening words spoken by Clytemnestra as the palace doors open, and the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra move forward so the entire arena of spectators in the theater can see what's happened.

Works spoken καιρίως -- "to serve my need" in Smyth's translation -- are the specialty of the rhetorician -- words twisted to the service of one particular moment and willed intent, then discarded as mere words.

ὡς μήτε φεύγειν μήτ᾽ ἀμύνεσθαι μόρον, 
ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, ὥσπερ ἰχθύων, 
περιστιχίζω, πλοῦτον εἵματος κακόν. 

That he should not flee nor keep off the end, 
an endless net around as to fish
I threw round, fatal wealth garment.

Here I twisted Smyth's translation to track more faithfully Aeschylus's highly packed lines. Most translators "unpack" the sense to a more familiar order. Here's how Smyth actually put it:

Round him, as if to catch a haul of fish, I cast an impassable net—fatal wealth of robe—so that he should neither escape nor ward off doom

There's no claim here that mine is better. The more of Smyth I see, the more I appreciate his tenacity.

I've created a play on words that is not in the original - where mine says:

    . . . nor keep off the end, 
an endless net . . .

I wish it were there, because the word that I render as endless is apeiron, i.e., ἄπειρον -- the word used by the philosopher Anaximander to invoke the unbounded. The Infinite.*

A few lines earlier, Clytemnestra spoke of

the contest of an ancient feud, pondered by me of old,

οὐκ ἀφρόντιστος πάλαι νείκης παλαιᾶς ἦλθε  1377-78

Twice she uses πάλαι -- "ancient" -- the quarrel is ancient, as is, more literally, her "not unmindfulness" of it.

Clytemnestra weaves her much pondered words around the dead Agamemnon and his prophetess-slave. They are rich, dark, unbounded, like the deed she takes credit for. Indeed, she's so plain in her desire for all to know "I did this" that the contrast with her earlier veil of lies and misdirections can be unsettling. After what we just learned, how can we trust anything she says, including her proud "confession"?

I don't want to get into an endless debate about "did she or didn't she?" --- the point here is that by negating everything she's said up to now, and then coming straight out with unequivocal statements, Clytemnestra jolts us into an awareness, a distrust of predication that lingers even as she claims to speak the truth. This is fitting, that with the king lying dead before our eyes, the truth from now on comes wrapped in a rich, infinite garment from which there is no escape for fish or king.

No wonder the chorus wonders:

We are shocked at your tongue, how bold-mouthed you are,  

θαυμάζομέν σου γλῶσσαν, ὡς θρασύστομος

If Cassandra is doomed to speak truth that will not be taken as true (as Simon Goldhill astutely notes), Clytemnestra's marvelous mouth, after ending the prophetess's speaking, cannot be disbelieved. In speaking, she undoes the possibility of speaking truth.

*ἄπειρος (B), ον, (πεῖραρ, πέρας)

A.boundless, infinite, “σκότος” Pi.Fr. 130.8; “τὸν ὑψοῦ τόνδ᾽ ἄ. αἰθέρα” E.Fr.941; ἤπειρον εἰς ἄ. ib.998; of number, countless,“πλῆθος” Hdt.1.204; “ἀριθμὸς ἄ. πλήθει” Pl.Prm.144a; “ἄ. τὸπλῆθος” Id.R.525a, al.; “εἰς ἄ. τὴν ἀδικίαν αὐξάνειν”Id.Lg.910b; “χρόνος ἄ.” OGI383.113 (i B.C.): Comp. “-ότερος”Dam.Pr.50, Phlp.in Mete.17.15; τὸ ἄ. the Infinite, as a first principle, Arist.Ph.203a3, etc.; esp. in the system of Anaximander, D.L.2.1, etc.; but τὰ ἄπειρα individuals, opp. τὰεἴδη, Arist.Top.109b14, cf. Metaph.999a27, al.; ἄπειρος, opp. πεπερασμένος, Ph.202b31; εἰς ἄ. ἰέναι, προϊέναι, ἥκειν, etc., APo.81b33, Ph.209a25, EN1113a2, etc.; [“γῆ] ἐπ᾽ ἄπειρονἐρριζωμένη” Str.1.1.20; also, indefinite, “ὕλη” Stoic.2.86.

2. in Trag., freq.of garments, etc., in which one is entangled past escape, i.e. without outlet,“ἀμφίβληστρον” A.Ag.1382; “χιτών” S.Fr.526; “ὕφασμα” E.Or.25.

3. endless, i.e. circular, ἀ. δακτύλιος a simple hoop-ring, = ἄλιθος (Poll. 7.179), Arist.Ph.207a2; cf. ἀπείρων (B) 1.3. Adv. -ρως, θρυφθῆναι into an infinite number of fragments, Id.Pr.899b16.