by Aeschylus
The Oresteia may also have a clear maternal bias. Athena is the virgin goddess yet she bears a mortal offspring, Athens. The trilogy consecrates her city, and ‘the city is a maternal symbol,’ as Jung describes it, ‘a woman who harbours the inhabitants in herself like children.’ More than an official Olympian statement, exclusively masculine as many have asserted, the Oresteia makes a boldly innovative, feminine appeal. And this appeal may well be crucial to Athens because of the supremacy of the male, the inferiority of the female in the democratic state. Far from an apologist for the status quo, Aeschylus defends the faith by reminding his Athenians of the tribal, matriarchal roots from which they came. Athena’s trial, as we have said, may lend support to the ties of marriage, a civic institution, against the ties of blood, the polis against the family, but Athena’s evenhanded verdict on Orestes - justifiable homicide, not innocence outright - enables her to redress the balance, to redeem the claims of the family in a sequel even more conclusive. She awards the Furies a handsome restitution, embracing them into Athens as citizens with equal rights, incorporated, even institutionalized, yet also greatly strengthened and enlarged. In fact the Oresteia grows into its final unions mainly by re-establishing the feminine and its powers. Necessarily so; for throughout these plays, men without women—Apollo, Agamemnon, Orestes without his sister and Clytaemnestra - appear myopic and destructive. Women dominate the trilogy, especially its resounding climax; not, as some suggest, because they are castrating females, unsexed at last by a threatened, mannish Athens, but because the Mother is the source of life itself. There Athena finds the one necessity that can humanize her Father. And Aeschylus finds the counterweight essential to the democratic balance. It is woman.
The Furies are the force that empowers The Eumenides. At last a chorus sings and acts in equal measure. The old men of Argos could only sing; the captive women could only urge the action on until it grew too fierce. The Furies are the action, ‘the heart of the past’ that drives the future, and the Furies are its music. Never has a chorus had such range, from silence to complete articulation, joyous, warm and clear. Through the Furies the language of Aeschylus suffers into truth, pathos into mathos more genuine for every mark it bears. Their song is a mimesis, a re-creation of pain that redeems the pain with meaning. The Furies are the artists of pain. They are the pangs of conscience that give rise to self-fulfilment. Without them Orestes would never strive for restoration, and Athena could never justify her father, or bring Athens and human consciousness to birth. More than child-avengers, teknopoinos, the Furies are teknopoios, child-breeding too. They are the Process, like the Great Mother as Nietzsche saw her, ‘eternally creating, eternally driving into life, in this rushing, whirling flux eternally seizing satisfaction’. They send us through a rush of recognitions, dramatic shocks that frighten us and further us at once; and the movement of their drama is unique. The Agamemnon coils, tightens; the light in the dark is strangled off at last. The Libation Bearers plunges out of darkness towards the light - the disaster that plunges us into darkness once again. The Eumenides sweeps us through a phantasmagoria of light and dark, of darkness breeding light, until the night brings forth the torches of our triumph, like the torches of that Fury Clytaemnestra, ‘glorious from the womb of Mother Night’. Night and day are mother and daughter, suffering and the illumination it can bring. For the energy of the Furies is as great with order as the energy of Dionysus. They are his wild maenads gathering moral force. They are the Mean Dynamic.
So they will become if we embrace them. Surely the gods of Aeschylus are superhuman powers, yet the Oresteia is such a humanistic statement one may often wonder if the gods could exist without us. They endure our tragic choices, and they build upon our strengths. The Will of Zeus becomes the will to human justice. Necessity becomes the force of life. Character is destiny after all, not in the ruinous spirit of Agamemnon at the start, but in the spirit of Athena who creates our destination - democracy, a human institution. The Oresteia is a theodicy, but as Nietzsche observed, ‘the gods justified human life by living it themselves - the only satisfactory theodicy!’ The gods become our powers, our energies and our ideals, and they are wedded by Athena, our compassion that alone can breed our culture.
More than a story of creation, the Oresteia is a story of our recreation as we struggle from the past to meet the future. The struggle and the union are inseparable, or so the double vision of The Eumenides suggests. We are in Athens of the heroic age which embodies Athens in her fifth-century prime; the original battle to found our institutions becomes our constant battle to preserve them. It is like the oracular style that Calchas first employed, the historical present that reveals what is to come, and it governs the poetics of the play. Everything from the first two plays is painfully recollected and renewed, yet all comes right at last. The imaginary trial that convicted Troy and Agamemnon comes to life, the judges are poised, the sense of crisis mounts, yet the verdict leads to acquittal and restitution. Images had come to life before, but never with so much fear that turns to so much hope. The blighted earth blooms; the storms of ruin become an auspicious, running wind; the sea that heaved with corpses is a rising tide of joy. We not only hear the Furies in full cry and feel them breathing down our necks - at the first performances women miscarried, others fainted, according to an ancient Life of Aeschylus - but we see them turn their hunt into a dance and then a march that leads to rightful ends, the Athenians’ pursuance of their culture. In fact every act of trampling in these plays becomes the progress of a civilization. All the blood weddings become the proteleia, the sacrifices preliminary to the marriage of the Eumenides and Athens. And Athena comprises all the embattled heroines before her - Athena, the wonderful revision of their suffering into all mankind’s success. Here is great clarity rising from great complexity, terror giving rise to reverence for life.
Nowhere is such regeneration felt more clearly than in the dominant symbol of the Oresteia, the nets of capture and the robes of ceremony. The robes materialize in the white robes of the gods and the aegis of Athena, the battle cape she lays aside. The nets materialize in the black cloaks of the Furies and the hunting-nets through which Orestes slips and which they lay aside. Both robes and nets will yield to a freely weaving play of image and enactment. The Furies’ nets extend into their binding-songs that bind them to their victim, but Orestes is ‘twined’ in Athena’s idol, too. His guilt and his innocence can never be disentangled, and neither can the Furies and the gods, the threads of the Fates and the grand design of Zeus. Their final binding-song connects us all, mortals, and immortals, in a vast moral network, not of retaliation as in the Agamemnon, or of recrimination as in The Libation Bearers, but of mutual responsibility. The chains of revenge are not so much broken as they are welded into the bonds of justice. We never lose our complicity with the curse, but now our cruelties may be referred to a magisterial court of law, as the closing symbol would imply. As the Furies don the Metics’ crimson robes, the colour of blood becomes the colour of authority, royal crimson worn by gods and kings. The nets of capture finally reinforce the robes of ceremony.
And if the closing procession recalls the Panathenaia, a greater piece of weaving rises before us - if only in imagination - the peplos of Athena, the magnificent robe her citizens wove for her at every harvest. It was the bridal colour, saffron, like the robes of Iphigeneia, but it renewed Athena’s life, her perennial, golden ripeness. In the weave were scenes of her triumph over the Giants, and the Gorgon’s snaky head. For her robe incorporated her winged aegis, her Olympian prowess, and her ties to Mother Earth. ‘Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,’ in Hart Crane’s lines, ‘the serpent with the eagle in the boughs.’ Athena is both the Victor and the spirit of the loom; and as her citizens raised her robe to the wind, like a sail to buoy forth their ship of state, it may have symbolized the fabric of Athenian society, resilient and controlled, which they bestowed upon posterity.
The Oresteia is the triumph of the Mean. The onl
y trilogy that remains to us from Greece embodies ‘the offence, the counter-offence, and the reconciliation’, as George Thomson says, ‘the resolution of discord into harmony, the triumph of democracy’. While The Eumenides may seem distinctly optimistic - an epilogue where ‘good wins out in glory in the end’ - its ties with the first two tragedies are strong and binding. The final play has three suggestive settings: the house of Apollo expands the house of Atreus haunted by the Furies; Athena’s shrine on the Acropolis expands the tragic choice at the hearth; the Areopagus resolves the tragic burden. And so the entire trilogy may seem to consist of three libations. After the libations poured to the gods, then poured to the dead, we have the third libation poured to Saving Zeus, and the third depends on the harshness of the first and second for its savour. The Eumenides not only reconciles the Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers; it preserves their special torments. The trilogy is like Eliot’s ‘ragged rock in the restless waters’.
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
It is all a matter of perspective. The craggy grandeur of Agamemnon may always dominate our vision - massive and immobile. Or when we consider the seasonal, ritualistic rhythm of the trilogy, The Libation Bearers may dominate the centre all the more - the rite of spring that follows a costly harvest of the past and impels the great good harvest still to come. In some sense it is always spring in the Oresteia, Orestes’ agony is so crucial.
But for many The Eumenides may predominate; it is the final vision, for better and for worse. For better, since it answers to a human need for respite after so much suffering, perhaps for a wedding of Hegelian opposites to crown the advance of history, idealized and perfected. But for others any optimistic vision may seem unreal, or worse, a delusion. And this particular vision may contain, despite itself, the seeds of historical ruin soon to come. The Eumenides celebrates the founding of the Argos League that would, in reality, rouse the Spartan columns and bring Athens to her knees. She would turn, as her new ally had turned, from an international victory to a fatal civil war. And her demise could only be hastened, especially in the eyes of later ages, by those urgings of Athena towards the end of The Eumenides which seem to launch an expansionist, imperialistic Athens on her way. But either reaction to the final play is probably a distortion. Far from Utopian and self-complete, its vision appeals for lasting endurance and endeavour. Its optimism has its price; ‘a contradiction is reconciled,’ as David Lenson says, ‘and we count the dead.’ And its chauvinism has its limits. In the continuous present of her play, in fact, Athena sounds a warning and a promise - a challenge to safeguard her civilization from the barbarism that surrounds it and infects it from within.
The Oresteia is Hegelian in its challenge. Not only do its three plays form a thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but its final synthesis is a spur to further struggle. Compare the trilogy to other visions of disobedience, woe and restoration - Milton’s grand three-part design for our salvation - and the more distinct it grows. Through the crimes in the house of Atreus the Oresteia may recall an original fall from paradise, the golden age of ease when men and gods were equal, before Tantalus prepared the first disastrous feast. But Aeschylus translates our fallen state from heredity to the conscience where the Furies urge us onward. Our fall is fortunate, not because the Furies are agents provocateurs, forces of evil manipulated by a god who acts in our behalf. Nor are they Sartre’s flies, the morbid forces of our guilt that enslave us to a fascist tyrant; nor Eliot’s ‘bright angels’ who warn that worldly affection is a sin, and society a trap. The Furies are our positive allies, ‘the fortunes of our lives’ because they make us love our lives, they root our lives within a vigorous social order.
Perhaps the Oresteia is the Divine Comedy of the antique world (a suggestion made by others that needs a study in reply), the Agamemnon an Inferno, The Libation Bearers a Purgatorio, The Eumenides a Paradiso. ‘In both tripartite works,’ as C. J. Herington has pointed out so clearly, ‘there is a similar movement, a gradual climb from torment, through testing, into the light.’ Yet as we journey from the dark to the light in Aeschylus, we cannot leave the dark behind - the darkness breeds the light. Here the Inferno is not only a great tide of destruction; it is also a source of human energy waiting to be channelled. And so this Purgatorio is less a sublimation of our mortality, a preparation for a realm beyond the human, than it is a deeper immersion in mortality itself. And it prepares us for a Paradiso very Greek indeed, an earthly paradise that is eternally demanding. We regain the golden age; men and gods join hands again, not in their ease but in their labour to create a brave new world.
The end of the trilogy may recall the final phase of Shakespeare’s work. After the tragic straits we reach a harbour like that of the late romances. But what makes the kingdom of The Tempest peaceable may be its distance, its atmosphere of dream and sea-change and miraculous reunion. In Aeschylus’ Eumenides we have a dream that turns to drama, a passionate encounter with reality. His salvation is neither in the imagination, ‘a paradise within thee, happier far’, nor in the city of god. It is in the city of man, where paradise must be earned with every passing day, and it exists in our very struggle to achieve it. Struggle is salvation, as Nietzsche would say. Or in the words of a modem revolutionary, ‘To climb Mount Everest is a premature aspiration, until you learn the way - the learning, that is the action.’ If Aeschylus celebrates progress, it is not as a limp myth of perfectibility but as a march, a never-ending effort.
Homer might agree, but Aeschylus’ vision of our destiny is larger. In The Eumenides he has worked loose from his master, to engage more freely with him and surpass him at the last. In this final Odyssey, after the bloody returns of Agamemnon and Orestes, it is a goddess who journeys home and brings her people to a point where vendettas may yield to justice once for all. As we move away from an Iliad, from a city razed by men and gods to a city they restore - a league of cities formerly hostile - the Oresteia presents a sweeping homeward turning, a universal harvest home. It is tragedy becoming epic in its affirmation and its scope. The ultimate pathos breeds the ultimate mathos, never losing sight of the labour and the danger still to come, not even in conclusion.
Originally the trilogy ended with a satyr-play called Proteus, also based on the Odyssey. Although it has not survived, it probably reenacted the adventures of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, who had been driven to Egypt by the storm that struck the fleets. It would have explained his absence at the time of the assassination and showed another son of Atreus - in a clearly lighter vein - coming to grips with destiny and its powers. Proteus was the Old Man of the Sea, the prophet of Poseidon (invoked at the outset of The Eumenides); and by wrestling with his shifting, slippery flux - now lion, now serpent, boar, tree, the sea itself - Menelaus wrings a prophecy of his future ‘with golden Rhadamanthos at the world’s end’, as Fitzgerald translates Homer, ‘where all existence is a dream of ease’. But in Aeschylus the theme of hard-won transformation, the harnessing of elemental forces, may have bound the satyr-play and trilogy together. For all its optimism, the Proteus may have reminded the Athenians that their lives were based on conflict, indeed that Athena had prevailed over Poseidon for possession of their city. So in the trilogy we reach an accommodation with the earth, but the sea, like Poseidon in the Odyssey, may remain to be placated. Almost all that remains of the buoyant Proteus, in fact, is one of Aeschylus’ more violent images - ‘a wretched struggling dove on the wing for food, /crushed by the winnowing fans, its breast split open’ - and a grim reminder of ‘a masterwork, irresistible, hard to strip away’.
Conflict remains the medium of our destiny in the Oresteia. Here it is always anxious spring, yet always harvest too. Sown in tears and reaped in joy, Dionysus is continuously dismembered and reborn. How could the trilogy embody so much grief and so much joy at once
? Perhaps it arose at a time, never again recovered, when tragedy was so inspired by Dionysus it could re-enact his death and resurrection in one dramatic span. Perhaps the suffering of the Greeks seemed totally constructive - out of the Persian wars emerged a truly stronger nation. Art and history might conspire, the birth of tragedy and the birth of democracy might be one.
Aeschylus is the creator of tragedy and, as Thomson describes him, ‘a democrat who fought as well as wrote’. His epitaph may tell us so:
Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus of Athens, Euphorion’s son
who died in the fields of Gela rich in wheat.
His strength, his glory the grove of Marathon can praise
and the long-haired Persian too - he learned it well.
He fought with his tragedies, his compatriot George Seferis has said, as if they were weapons that might keep his country free. And his soldiery of song, like that of the old men of Argos, grew as he grew older. We may surmise from what remains - seven out of perhaps ninety plays - that he turned from dread to hope, as Herington suggests, and that he probed, ever more deeply, the bond between the two. It was a triumph of concentration, perfected after he had reached the age of fifty. In The Persians the invaders are destroyed and Athens gathers strength. The Suppliant Maidens are coerced into a union with society, reflecting a fruitful union of the Heavens and the Earth. And this bond between destruction and creation, this symbiosis, lies at the heart of Aeschylus’ last work, the Prometheia and the Oresteia.
The latter, created two years before his death and awarded first prize by his city, represents the maturity of Aeschylus and Athens. It is a kind of national biography, and he rehearsed it in public as a playwright who directed and actually performed his work. Aeschylus the actor emulated Aeschylus the poet; he galvanized his words upon the stage. We may imagine him striving together with Orestes, torn by the forces that contended for his world, the archaic against the modern, and eager to unite them. For Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, close to the Mysteries, yet Athens was his city. One of the ancient nobility, he was also a democrat - a fine amphibian, adapted to the present and the past. He epitomized Ortega’s man of antiquity: ‘before he did anything, [he] took a step backwards, like the bullfighter who leaps back to deliver his mortal thrust’. As Aeschylus portrays the founding of the Areopagus, he may seem to endorse the latest, radical reforms that curbed its jurisdiction to cases of homicide, but he also recalls its older senatorial powers that had been stripped, he urges against all innovations in the court, and lends it a broad humanitarian cast that should govern life to come. A conservative democrat, he conserves his origins by competing with them, evincing their potential for the future.
