The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies

by Aeschylus

  But Clytaemnestra wants a crisis. Suddenly she ‘prosecutes’ the action - ‘I see murder in your eyes, my child - mother’s murder !’ - a horrified accusation and a challenge, and they break into a passionate interchange. It is not matricide, Orestes insists; her guilt will make it suicide. But her curse will hunt him down - no gentle warning now - but unless he murders her his father’s curse will do the same:

  CLYTAEMNESTRA

  I must be spilling live tears on a tomb of stone.

  ORESTES

  Yes, my father’s destiny - it decrees your death.

  CLYTAEMNESTRA

  Ai - you are the snake I bore - I gave you life!

  ORESTES

  Yes!

  That was the great seer, that terror in your dreams.

  You killed and it was outrage - suffer outrage now.

  She creates her fate and she accepts it, and she rises to her tragic greatness. Her agony passes into affirmation - the mother’s death-cry is a birth-cry too, for she brings forth the destiny of her son; she turns his innocence into power. It is not purity of heart that impels Orestes; it is his mother’s heart. Apollo can reduce him to an instrument of vengeance. Only she can generate his action as a man. These are the poles of the tragic quandary: the yoke of necessity and the drive of human will, and Orestes must incorporate them both. He is his father’s and his mother’s son, but he and Clytaemnestra are better than Agamemnon and his gods. More than enact a brutal destiny blindly, they would counteract it with creative sorrow - with their painful, mutual awareness that outrage must be met by greater outrage.

  As Orestes takes his mother through the doors, the women celebrate the gods and sing of justice, oblivious to all that lies ahead. The light of freedom is breaking through the dark, as they maintain, but when the doors swing open and the torches blaze, we behold a ‘dawn of the darkness’ once again, a stunning déjà vu. Sword in hand, Orestes rises over the bodies of Clytaemnestra and her lover, as she had risen over his father and Cassandra. Like his mother, he claims to end the curse, to play the role of justice. But history repeats itself, as Joyce advises, with a difference. Orestes is frenzied by the memory of his victim - then, summoned by his own incriminations, the fury of his mother maddens him with deeper and deeper states of moral insight. Her medium is her masterpiece, the robes that entangled Agamemnon’s body and now entangle hers. In fact the robes produce a family reunion; they unite the murdered parents with their son, the avenger and the matricide - the robes present the love knot of his mission and his guilt. For Orestes exhibits them, as Clytaemnestra did, to exonerate himself, but he finds the stains not only of his father’s blood, his rightful cue to passion, but of his mother’s, too. He embraces the robes as if they were the king, fulfilling his debt of mourning; embracing them as if they were the queen, he cries aloud his crime. He cannot assume his parents’ powers unless he accepts their dark pathologies as well. The public trial that concluded Agamemnon has narrowed into the young man’s troubled psyche, rendering him the judge and convict both. Standing in his mother’s steps, he is the latest victim of the curse.

  Yet Orestes is also the consummation of the curse. His father embodies its negative aspect, its murderousness. Orestes adds the fierce humanity of his mother, and in their relationship the curse may begin to find its cure. For he, unlike his father, gives his mother what she always needed, worthy opposition. He is endowed with all her gifts, from verbal agility to moral stature - the mother and the son complete each other. Orestes has an Oedipus complex, with a difference. ‘Indeed he does,’ some will object, ‘he loves his father and murders his mother!’ But what we mean is that he rivals his father and replaces him because his authority is more valid, more humane. Perhaps because he hungers for his mother, and that hunger is channelled into the psychic richness and responsibility that flourishes between them. Even though he kills her, yes, for together they will project their bond into the most creative reaches of the Oresteia. They not only prefigure the union of Fury and justice that concludes the trilogy. They make that justice worth the suffering in the first place, stringent and compassionate in one.

  For the present, however, Orestes must suffer for ‘the race of man’, and as his mission grows his trials grow as well. He appeals to Apollo, who commanded him to avenge his father and promised to purge him in return. At last a god can be held accountable for a murder in the house, and Apollo will participate in Orestes’ exoneration. But here, as he is invested with Apollo’s insignia and turns towards Delphi he may have his doubts. ‘Go through with [your revenge],’ Apollo urged, ‘and you go free of guilt.’ Perhaps, but Orestes no sooner murders his mother - lops her serpent head, as the women say - than the serpents of her Furies flash and tangle in his eyes. And they are stronger than the blood-guilt which Apollo’s arts can purge. They are the forces of conscience and would go their wild way, were it not for the nature of their source - his mother’s blood, his own life-blood that he has shed. Matricide is a kind of suicide for Orestes; at the same time matricide may expand him. The matriarchal Furies are both his punishment and, in a sense, his power. They are, above all, a terrifying reversal of the mourning women Orestes saw at first. Dressed in black, a ‘new wound to the house’, they drive him mad - they drive him into a new, more desperate flight - yet the Furies also galvanize his perceptions and, as we shall see, they force him on to Delphi, then to Athens where he is restored. As Orestes goes to meet his more climactic trials, he is equipped with all that he inherits from his mother: tragic heroism, the power to suffer into truth, and more. In the midst of terror an act of symbiosis has begun between the mother and the son. Cursed and murderous as they are, they have begun to regenerate the curse.

  In Agamemnon everyone is in the grip of larger forces. The gates close; the ramparts loom. It is not a play of action. The poetry is the action, but the long casts back to Troy and forward to Argos only tighten the patterns of reprisal like a vice. Violence breeds violence, and all that can counteract it is an attitude, the will to suffer more. The Libation Bearers breaks the deadlock. Here is a new generation, a new attempt to penetrate the massive walls, a new accommodation with the gods. The tone of the play is deeply inward. The Furies, once an expedition sent to Troy, are assaults within the brain. Aeschylus probes his sources. Scenes that stir with an Odyssean quiet may even tell us more; here at the grave, the dead father hears what he never heard in Homer, the voices of his children. And within the atmosphere of the hearth, the baths, the old nurse and the traveller’s ingratiating talk, lies a re-creation of the Odyssev at least as psychological and expansive. The hostess welcomes a stranger - the son who returns for vengeance but must kill his mother together with her suitor. Homer’s story of revenge turns tragic, yet the family expands with humanity as well. Clytaemnestra rivals her suitor in treachery and Penelope in maternal strength. Orestes rivals Odysseus in savagery, Telemachus in maturity. In terms of Homer he is both the father and the son. He is his own father, one might say: more self-determined than predetermined, his character may improve upon his destiny. That is the purpose of Orestes’ play-within-a-play: to create his own identity so fully that, when he enacts his ruthless, destined part, he can recast it with dignity and insight. Orestes is a prophet, as the chorus sees him, because he has a vision of himself.

  If people are demonized in Agamemnon, here they personalize their gods. The gods remain in Delphi or Olympus, but ‘the rough work of the world is still to do’, and men who go about it find divinity in themselves. The magnificence of the opening play is muted, less because the king is gone and the work at hand is ugly than because a fresh new spirit is required. The gorgeous arias yield to conversations. There is an intimacy breathing in the shadows, warm, confiding, alive. Something can be done. The Libation Bearers is a play of action.

  The plays are as different as their choruses. The old men of Argos reach back to the heroic past; like Homer they invoke the muse and find that she is Fury. Still they strain to praise the gods, they seize on
Olympian doctrines to shield them from the truth. But once it crashes through, they learn what they had never known before - how it feels to suffer - and they convert to the Furies in the end. The captive women have known the Furies all along but fail to use their powers to the full. Victims of the wars abroad and the strife in Argos, they yearn to support Orestes and the mission of Apollo. When they reach to the past, they show how the present exceeds all past example. They live to provide momentum here and now; cajoling, goading, bloody-minded, they are the midwives to the action. They cry to the gods for help, too rushed for doctrine. Their style is stripped, their morality is at last simplistic - too vindictive or too optimistic, they leap to the future when justice will prevail, and flee the arena where Orestes struggles on. They are finally extruded from the action. They leave a vacuum which the Furies fill.

  The Furies will unify language and action, and Orestes leads the way. Even when his syntax and his conscience go insane, his shattering holds a kind of promise. His language at the outset, like his conscience, strains for commitment - now too sure, now insecure, too pious or despondent, feverish, overwrought. But after his painful recognitions he can articulate the conflicts of maturity itself. He is torn between his maddening insights and his desire for the rights; his cries clash out against his closing prayers. Orestes’ fury and his gods are clashing, but the language of the play predicts their union, especially in that symbol of complicity from Agamemnon, the nets of capture and the ceremonious robes. Here they reticulate in subtle ways. First in the strands of hair Orestes places on the grave, one for death and one for life. As Electra animates the strands, she brings her brother forth; and, as the children recall the lethal net, they lash their father back to life and invigorate themselves. ‘Corks to the net, they rescue the linen meshes/from the depths. This line will never drown!’ Their very existence is a weave of life and death, like Electra’s web that binds the wild beasts in its design, and unites her with her brother in vengefulness and love.

  We see the weave most clearly in another symbol, perhaps the living, coiling extension of the nets, that dominates this play. At first the serpent is the queen who kills the warlord in her coils, but she also presses her children to conspire against her, and the serpent in her nightmare lends Orestes will to act. The meaning of his action springs from a new bond between the serpent and the nets. The bloody robes that trammelled the bodies of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, that embody Orestes’ mission and his guilt, stimulate the snaky-headed Furies in his mind. And in a sense he is doubly invested at the end, with the Furies’ swarming cloaks as well as with the trappings of Apollo, a Nessus shirt and a habit of perfection. For Orestes may prefigure a union of the warring moral orders in the Oresteia - he may become the fury of the justice of the gods. As he rushes out, his language and his action work together. All that he envisions leads him on.

  In The Libation Bearers vision enlivens action, for better and for worse. The brother and the sister embrace, yet they only foreshadow the embrace between the mother and the son. The characteristic act of Agamemnon is a trampling; here it is an embrace of opposites that may empower each other. Separate images from the first play grow more human and promise to combine. Blended in with the serpent and the net is the image of the eagle, the ominous bird of Zeus. Here the eagle-king has been strangled by the she-snake, but his nestlings will avenge him. This conflict between the eagles and the serpent may suggest a final triumph of the Olympians over the forces of the Earth, but Aeschylus is actually moving towards their union, and Orestes is identified with both. A stranger to the trilogy might have thought Orestes would simply avenge his father by murdering his mother - masculine will suppressing feminine energy. Not at all. Orestes must embody his mother’s energy, and it will drive him from Argos and insanity to the light. In this central play the conflict between male and female has become a dialectic struggle moving towards a resolution. That is why Aeschylus makes the murder of Aegisthus insignificant but lifts the act of matricide to paramount importance. Mother and son are agonizing out their evolution, and the mutual labour of the generations is unique to Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

  In later treatments of the legend it recedes, Orestes’ resoluteness slowly crumbles, and a lethal rivalry between Clytaemnestra and Electra takes the stage. As we move from Sophocles to Euripides, from a daughter who reincarnates her mother’s proud, tragic vengefulness to one who lashes her mother’s failing powers to a maddened pitch within herself, we watch the house of Atreus degenerate. The more Clytacmnestra’s maternal energies fail in the later plays, the more the act of matricide is drained of vital impact, and her Furies finally abandon their creative struggle with the gods. What Aeschylus dramatizes as the necessary roots of justice, Sophocles views with the cruel indifference of Olympus, and Euripides condemns. The legend is demythologized in a harsh, more modem light that some find realistic, others cynical and black. ‘The crisis of our lives’ becomes a private nightmare. Evolution turns to incest, to entropy. The leap across the centuries to O’Neill and Hofmannsthal and Strauss seems brief, as the ancestral house contracts into the prison of one’s pathology and one’s past. In the opera Elektra the suicidal energies of the daughter, mounting into the ecstatic murder of her mother, burn out in her maenadic dance of death. In Mourning Becomes Electra the daughter reverts to her mother’s phantom spirit and cohabits with the dead - it is the most defeatist, deterministic version of the Oresteia that we have. The tale of the tribe becomes a story of the tribe’s disintegration.

  But in Aeschylus the act of matricide gathers a positive momentum. The Libation Bearers has a headlong forward thrust. Its movement is a metaphor for Orestes’ surging will; his lust for vengeance is building into justice. Dionysus is dying into life, and here his rite of spring, ultimately unlike the Anthesteria, celebrates his dying into later, ever larger forms of life. This is the traumatic springtime of our culture. The play liberates our perspective once for all. We are breaking free of the walled, claustrophobic citadel - like Mycenae, as Henry Miller saw it, ‘one of the navels of the human spirit, the place of attachment to the past and of complete severance too’. A greater rite of passage has begun; it begins in agony, but it will end on the level, lucid heights of Athens. Only after death can Clytaemnestra pass from mother to the Furies to the Eumenides. Like the serpents in the Gorgon’s hair, their serpents imply reprisal and revival, the healing power of the gods. For the serpent was also a prototype of Zeus and it soon will lend the Furies true redemptive strength. And Orestes has a final passage, too. Through the onslaught of the Furies he becomes a purgatorial hero, the scapegoat who absorbs his people’s guilt and grows into their prince, the living promise of his father’s kingdom. Orestes must suffer into Everyman, our last, best hope. The gods and the Furies may exist without him, but it is within his conscience that they live and battle; then, like actors in a drama, they will speak and make their peace.

  The crux of the Oresteia is the fierce embrace between the mother and the son. Only they can humanize the gods; then the gods can humanize our world. He and she cannot foresee the magnificent unions still to come - they can only create their possibility. Yet the captive women cannot even see the Furies. They see Orestes’ triumph and his torment, a baffling repetition of the curse. He seemed a saviour in the third generation, like Third Saving Zeus, or was he Death? He is both; he is the prince and outlaw, humanity in ruins and perfection. But this is a vision for the chorus just emerging. The Furies will embrace him still more fiercely and, with Athena as their leader, generate the justice of the gods.

  THE EUMENIDES

  The Eumenides turns the darkness into light. Dionysus dies and lives again. It is the harvest of the god, the season ‘barbarous and beautiful’, when the waning year is bursting with its fruits, and loss and regeneration seem the same. The Oresteia ends with rites of autumn. Aeschylus may recall the Thesmophoria, when the women reap and sow, singing their spells that ban and bless, that purify the present crop and reinforce the next. The fina
l play, as some have said, is so expansive it may even recall the Mysteries of Eleusis. These enlarged the Thesmophoria into rites so guarded, so close to the soul it was heresy to reveal their secrets, yet so democratic - open to free men and slaves alike - that they became the national religion of Greece.

  The Mysteries began as a harvest rite that celebrated the gift of agriculture as the fruits of the ordeal of Demeter and her daughter. Kore or Persephone was abducted to the underworld by Hades and cost her mother ‘all that pain/To seek her through the world’. In her fury Demeter loosed a blight on the earth until Zeus interceded, won the release of Kore, and reunited her with her mother. Every year, however, Kore must descend again as the bride of Death; yet as if her potency depended on her dying, she rises in the spring and bears the grain, her grateful mother’s gift. And Demeter is admitted to Olympus, the gods of the Earth and Sky unite, rejoicing in a Theogony that ends in harmony rather than suppression. It may be our most moving, human story of the gods, for Demeter also gave us the Mysteries that ally us with the gods in suffering and success. The Mysteries transformed the violation of Kore, the trials of Demeter and their reunion into a threefold ritual of purgation, passion play and pageant. The celebrant might see the purging and the passion as his tribulations in this life, and the final pageant, the return of Kore, as a sacred birth, and the union of the gods as a sacred marriage that renewed him and prepared him for his death.