by Aeschylus
542 Violence is Impiety’s child, etc. The genealogy of hubris that Agamemnon fatally embodied will be succeeded by legitimate prosperity; see A 744-60, and Introduction, p. 78.
573 Etruscan battle-trumpet: Etruria in Italy manufactured a celebrated kind of trumpet in the fifth century B.C. It was thought to be Athena’s special instrument.
588ff The trial begins: for some of Aeschylus’ adaptations of fifth-century legal procedure, see Introduction, pp. 78ff. The Furies’ first two questions are formulaic - quid, quomodo: Did you kill your mother? Yes. How? I cut her throat, Orestes answers staunchly. But the third - quibus auxiliis: With whose help? - reveals that Apollo has brought him to this pass, yet left him quite defenceless. He must rely on his father, though the Furies remind him Agamemnon is as dead as the mother Orestes murdered. She had to die, she killed two men at once - father and husband both - he protests ingeniously; but die she did, absolved, in effect, while he lives on for trial. The Furies’ logic is ruthless. Orestes asks why they never pursued his mother. They only punish kindred murder, they say, contradicting themselves perhaps, but leading him to his most contradictory defence.
595 Three falls: see A n. 169ff.
628 Zeus, you say, etc. As the Furies waived the prosecutor’s customary speech for a dramatic cross-examination of Orestes, so when Apollo plays the sunêgoros or public advocate, they tersely interrupt his speech for the defence.
635 The Amazons were famous as archers; see n. 697ff.
655ff But once the dust drinks down a man’s blood, etc. The familiar theme, applied in turn against Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra and Orestes, finally recoils, as Thomson observes, ‘to show that the case of Orestes cannot be decided by a simple appeal to the lex talionis’. It is a curious irony of history that Apollo emphatically denies the possibility of a resurrection in addressing the court of the Areopagus where, more than 500 years after the performance of this trilogy, Saint Paul would make belief in the Resurrection the kernel of his appeal to the Athenians to accept the new faith.
666ff Apollo alleges that mothers are not true parents but only act as receptacles, so to speak, for the child which is already formed in the sperm of the father. The argument was of biological interest to the Greeks; it was also sociological and economic propaganda which might be used to ensure the male inheritance of property in the democratic state.
682ff A new ally, etc. For Apollo’s questionable conduct during the trial, see Introduction, pp. 78ff. He may even end his peroration by adding insult to injury. Orestes freely offered Athena the loyalty of Argos (E 288-90); now Apollo dangles it before her as a bribe.
696ff This will be the court : Aeschylus’ derivation of the Areopagus from the trial of Orestes reflects the poet’s response to the democratic reforms which, during his lifetime, had curtailed the powers of the supreme court of Athens. The choice of judges, formerly a matter of aristocratic birth, had been ‘democratized’ by the introduction of the lot; the authority of the court as a king’s council that oversaw the workings of the Constitution had been eliminated; and its jurisdiction had been reduced to cases of homicide. Aeschylus may seem to support the last reform by deriving the court from a case of homicide, but his warnings against innovations (706ff.), his reference to the Areopagus as a bouleutêrion, a senate as well as a tribunal (696, 718), and the democratic cast which he imparts to the ancient institution at its inception may suggest that he wishes to preserve its broadest powers.
697ff An Attic legend said that the Amazons, a nation of women warriors from near the Black Sea, once invaded Athens and occupied the ‘Crag of Ares’ (i.e., the rock of the Areopagus opposite the entrance to the Acropolis) in revenge for Theseus’ attack on them and his abduction of their queen Hippolyta. The Athenians defeated the Amazons and drove them off. The Persians also used the Areopagus as a launching site for their attack on the Acropolis. Legend and history often merge in the suggestive double vision of the play; see Introduction, p. 89; notes 289, 491ff., 409, 413, 696ff.
717 Scythia’s rugged steppes or Pelops’ level plain: Scythia was a district northwest of the Black Sea. Pelops’ name was given to the Peloponnese (literally ‘the island of Pelops’). The two names are used to represent the uncivilized and civilized world.
720 Night watch: the image once applied to Clytaemnestra (A 257). The nightly sessions of the Areopagus, its vigilance and severity may suggest that the great court bears similarities to chthonic worship, in fact that Athena has institutionalized the Furies; see Introduction, p. 81.
726ff The interchange between Apollo and the Furies may be ‘mythological mudslinging’, as Anne Lebeck has called it. The Furies are clearly not without their threats, but Apollo’s threats combine wobbly mythology with a certain moral obtuseness. Did Zeus’s judgement falter, he asks, when he pardoned Ixion for manslaughter? Yes, perhaps. The man went right on sinning - he tried to seduce Hera, courting the punishment he received: perpetual rotation on a wheel. And Admetus (the son of Pheres, king of Thessaly) was less a model of piety, as Apollo claims, than simply a favourite of the god. Apollo drugged the Fates with wine, moreover, and so ‘persuaded’ them to allow Admetus to escape his death on condition that he should find a good replacement. (His wife, Alcestis, undertook to die for him and was restored to life by the intervention of Apollo and Heracles.) There may be a question, in short, about the credibility of the gods. It may be as much to lend them support as to blunt the Furies’ anger, which may indeed be valid, that Athena casts her ballot as she does; see Introduction, pp. 81ff
767 The lots are equal: the question of the number of the jurors and the nature of their verdict is vexed indeed. Some have argued that their number is uneven, that they vote six to five (according to the allotment of lines 726-48: two lines for each of ten jurors, three lines for an eleventh) in favour of the Furies, and that Athena casts her lot for Orestes, simultaneously creating the tie which her vote is designed to break. ‘This view, however,’ as Thomson points out in his extensive note on the problem, ‘is incompatible with [806-8], where Athena, anxious to conciliate the Furies, tells them that they have not really been defeated because the votes were equal. If the votes have only been made equal by the addition of her own, she is adding insult to injury. She could only hope to appease the Furies by such an argument if the votes of the judges have been equally divided irrespective of her own.’ Persuaded by such internal evidence, we prefer to believe that the number of jurors is even, that they may be deadlocked five to five (allotting 726-45 into ten couplets for ten jurors, followed by the eccentric triplet which allows the jurors to return to their seats), and that Athena’s ballot may simply break the tie.
‘As to the grounds on which Athena bases her decision,’ Thomson continues, ‘they are stated plainly and unequivocally . . . [751-5]; and . . . they touch the vital point at issue. In the later tradition her motive is said to have been mercy . . . or, what is virtually the same thing, filanthrôpia. . . . In this play too her conduct throughout is expressive of these qualities, but, if Aeschylus had wished to leave her motive as indefinite as that, he would have done so; and the fact that he did not, but made her base her decision on particular reasons deduced from the hearing of the case, can only mean that she upholds the plea from the defence that the homicide was justifiable. This is not inconsistent with her attitude at [484-7], where she was merely concerned to explain why she could not decide the issue out of hand, as both parties to the dispute expected her to do; nor is it inconsistent with her assurance to the Furies at [806-8], where she contends that, since the votes of the judges were equally divided, the result cannot be regarded as dishonourable to them.’
What is crucial, in other words, is that Athena conduct herself so judiciously throughout the trial that, throughout its aftermath which may be more important, she can mediate successfully between the Furies and the citizens of Athens For beyond the question of the balloting and the number of the jurors, where internal evidence may be debated, and beyond the question of Athena
’s motives, where internal evidence would seem to be convincing, lies the clear. momentous result of the court proceeding in The Eumenides: namely, Athena’s establishment of justice, not with the collaboration of her fellow Olympians - least of all with Apollo the God of Law - but with the rudimentary morality of the Furies and the indispensable, never-ending efforts of mankind; see Introduction, pp. 83ff.
771 ‘He lives again,’ etc. Orestes may echo Hector in the Iliad (Book VI, line 479ff.), fulfilling in effect that father’s hope that a son may live a greater life than he.
781 We ourselves: the royal We, perhaps, or a reference to Orestes and his father, reunited in spirit.
792 You have ridden down, etc. Now the Furies have been ridden down by all the gods, not simply Apollo (see 151); now they will not only attack mankind (514ff.) but devastate the earth.
816ff By all my rights: as the exclusive patroness of Athens. Here and in her next speech Athena institutionalizes what Clytaemnestra had offered the Furies earlier - an elaborate sacrifice appropriate to the spirits of the dead - but by accepting Athena’s offer of the land’s first fruits the Furies also become, in effect, the spirits of regeneration; see 110ff. and n.
838 His lightning-bolt: Athena was the only other Olympian empowered to use the preferred weapon of Zeus.
847 Disgrace, etc. What the Furies deplore is the idea that they should lose their power of roaming the earth in pursuit of the blood-guilty and be confined merely to a cave in Athens.
870 The battle cock: see A n. 1706.
877 Do great things, etc. The phrasing may transform the lex talionis - the law of retaliation that ‘the one who does the work must suffer’ - into a civilized law of responsibility and reward; see A n. 1592, LB n. 320.
893 Persuasion Peitho has finally evolved from a destructive force to its most compassionate, constructive form, the power by which one wins an opponent over by reason rather than compulsion. Peitho also has an institutional, political and ‘democratic’ power especially sacred to Athens, where her worship was established by Theseus, her statue stood near the Acropolis, and her priestess enjoyed a special seat in the Theatre of Dionysus; see Introduction, pp. 84f.; E 839, 891f.; A n. 378ff., LB n. 714.
913 Nothing that strikes a note of brutal conquest: ‘While the victory is [Athena’sj,’ as Thomson comments, ‘the credit for it belongs to the Furies who have conceded it.’ Agamemnon’s fatal concessions to Clytaemnestra have come right at last; see A 938ff.
930 Ares: as if to include the alternate version of the founding of the Areopagus, where Ares was exonerated for manslaughter.
941ff The fact that Athena speaks now in lyric anapaests, not in the iambics of dialogue, shows that she is deeply moved by the ‘conversion’ of the Furies, who reply in freer lyric rhythms. This form recalls the exchange between Clytaemnestra and the elders at the end of A (1476-1605) ; its result, the creation of social harmony, is the opposite.
946 The crimes of his fathers, etc. Some believe that Aeschylus would not revert to a doctrine of hereditary guilt unless it pertained to the procedure of the Areopagus, namely, the oath which those who testified would take, ‘in effect a curse which they invoked’, as Thomson explains, ‘in the event of their committing perjury, on themselves and their descendants’.
955 Pan, etc. Pan had a shrine on the slopes of the Acropolis near the Areopagus; Earth, Hermes and Ploutos or Wealth had statues in the sanctuary of the Semnai at the base of the Areopagus.
958f Silver: there may be a reference to the rich silver mines at Laureion in Attica. Secret treasure of Hermes: who brings wealth to light, the god of lucky finds.
972 Gods of wedlock, etc. In the spirit of reconciliation that ends the Oresteia, the Olympian Zeus and Hera coalesce with the matriarchal Fates, now also known as ‘gods’ as well as ’spirits‘, who coalesce in turn with the Furies, their sisters by their common mother Night.
983 Zeus Agoraios, the god of popular assemblies where ‘persuasive oratory carries the day’ (Rose).
1020 The Rock King: a way of referring to the king of the rocky Acropolis in the time of the earliest inhabitants whom the Greeks called Pelasgians.
1021 Our guests: literally Metics, metoikoi. This word, which means in general ‘people who change their residence’, had a special meaning in Athens where the Metics comprised a special class of foreigners with certain rights and privileges (though not those of full citizenship). This enlightened policy indicated a more tolerant attitude towards foreigners than elsewhere in Greece; see A n. 63, LB n. 959. For resemblances between the conclusion of E and the Panathenaic Procession, the public ritual in which the Metics received their yearly recognition, see Introduction, p. 86; and Walter Headlam, ‘The Last Scene of The Eumenides’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxvi (1906), 268-77.
1046 The first dark vaults of Earth: the Furies, now to be known as the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones (1050, though the line may be disputed), were believed by the Athenians to inhabit a sacred cave on the north face of the Acropolis; as the Semnai Theai, the Awesome Goddesses, they enjoyed a similar sanctuary at the base of the Areopagus. Aeschylus is the first writer known to have made this triple identification.
1053 Cry in triumph: the earlier cries of vengeance echo now in cries of joy; see A n. 30, LB n. 383.
1054 This peace: this doubtful passage may contain a reference to the Truce of God during the Olympic Games and the Eleusinian Mysteries, a moment of harmony between mortals and immortals here perhaps made permanent at last.
1055 Zeus and Fate: in the archaic world the relationship between Zeus and Fate had been ambiguous - now one predominated, now the other; the Oresteia concludes with a balance of power between the two great forces; see Introduction, pp. 86ff.
GLOSSARY
ACHERON: one of the rivers of Hades.
AEGEUS: a legendary king of Athens and father of Theseus.
AEGISTHUS: the son of Thyestes, paramour of Clytaemnestra, usurper of Agamemnon’s throne.
AGAMEMNON: the son of Atreus, brother of Menelaus, husband of Clytaemnestra and father of Iphigeneia, Orestes and Electra; commander-in-chief of the Greek expeditionary forces sent to Troy, and king of Argos.
ALTHAIA: the daughter of Thesdos and Eurythemis, who murdered her son Meleager; see LB n. 587.
AMAZONS: a nation of women warriors from near the Black Sea, famous as archers and the invaders of Athens; see E n. 697ff.
APOLLO: the god whose provinces include music, poetry and the arts of government and civilization, invoked in the Oresteia as the god of archery, roads, healing, prophecy, purification and the law; see Introduction, pp. 17, 36ff., 53f., 56, 72ff., 79ff.; A notes 107, 1218; E notes 65f., 726ff.
AREOPAGUS: the supreme court of Athens, named for its location on the Crag of Ares; see E n. 696ff.
ARES: the god of battle and the warlike spirit.
ARGOS: a city on the Argive Plain and, throughout the trilogy, the seat of Agamemnon’s empire, hence the name given to a district in the north-eastern Peloponnese, or more generally, to Greece itself; see A introductory n.
ARTEMIS: the sister of Apollo, goddess of the hunt, wild creatures, childbirth and fertility; see A n. 135ff.
ATHENA: the daughter of Zeus and patron goddess of Athens; the virgin warrioress and protectress of the city, whose provinces include the arts of government, the handicrafts of women, skills in general and wisdom; see Introduction, pp 23, 76ff.
ATREUS: the son of Pelops and father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, the Atreidae.
AULIS: a district on the narrow strait between Euboea and the Greek mainland where the Greek fleets gathered before embarking for Troy and where Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigeneia.
BEACONS: for locations of the stations, see A notes 281ff. through 309.
CALCHAS: the seer of the Greek armies.
CASSANDRA: daughter of Hecuba and Priam, king of Troy; priestess of Apollo, abducted to Argos by Agamemnon and murdered with him by Clytaemnestra; see Introduction, pp. 35ff.; A notes 1145, 119
6, 1218, 1279, 1297.
CLYTAEMNESTRA : the daughter of Leda and Tyndareos, king of Sparta; wife of Agamemnon and paramour of Aegisthus, mother of Iphigeneia, Orestes and Electra, and queen of Argos.
DAULIS: a district in Phokis on the road from Thebes to Delphi; see LB n. 657.
DELOS: the island birthplace of Apollo and one of his chief sanctuaries.
DELPHIC ORACLE. the supreme oracular seat of Greece, originally sacred to Mother Earth but later presided over by Apollo. It is located on the southern slopes of Parnassus and towers above the Gulf of Corinth.
DELPHOS: the eponymous hero of Delphi.
DIONYSUS: the son of Semele and Zeus, god of fertility, wine and ecstasy; see Introduction, pp. 17ff , 52f., 70, 72f., 94.
DOG STAR: Sirius (from Seirios, the Scorcher), the brightest star in the heavens, whose summer appearances are associated with madness and intense heat.
ELECTRA: the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, sister of Orestes and Iphigeneia.
ERECHTHEUS: an early king of Athens whose house, called the Erechtheum, was on the Acropolis.
FATES: the Moirai (‘the Apportioners’), shadowy but potent figures who ultimately controlled men’s destiny. How far their powers and those of Zeus overlapped was a major problem in Greek religion and formed part of the theme of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy; see Introduction, pp. 85ff.; A n. 131, E notes 335, 972, 1055.
FURY: Vengeance personified; see Introduction, throughout.
GERYON: a mythical giant with three bodies and three lives; see A n. 859.
GORGON: a fabulous female monster whose glance could turn a person into stone; see LB n. 818, E n. 51ff.
HADES: the lord of the underworld and arbitrator of the dead.
HARPIES: winged female demons; see E n. 51ff.
HELEN: the daughter of Zeus and Leda, half-sister of Clytaemnestra; her abduction by Paris produced the war between the Greeks and Trojans.