by Aeschylus
Believe what you see.
But now you have come, I am yours to command.
Alone, I would have done one of two things: deliver myself or else die.
ORESTES : Quiet! I hear someone coming out.
ELEKTRA : Go inside, strangers. You are bringing a gift they can neither reject nor rejoice in.
[Enter the OLD MAN.]
OLD MAN : Idiots! Have you lost your wits completely, and your instinct to survive as well—or were you born brainless?
You’re not on the brink of disaster now, you’re right in the eye of it, don’t you see that?
Why, except for me standing guard at the door here this long while, your plans would have been in the house before yourselves!
Good thing I took caution.
Now cut short the speechmaking, stifle your joy and go into the house. Go!
Delay is disaster in things like this.
Get it over with: that’s the point now.
ORESTES : How will I find things inside?
OLD MAN : Perfect. No one will know you.
ORESTES : You reported me dead?
OLD MAN : You are deep in hell, so far as they know.
ORESTES : Are they happy at this?
OLD MAN : I’ll tell you that later. For now, the whole plan is unfolding beautifully.
Even the ugly parts.
ELEKTRA : Who is this man, brother?
ORESTES : Don’t you know him?
ELEKTRA : Not even remotely.
ORESTES : You don’t know the man into whose hands you put me, once long ago?
ELEKTRA : What man? What are you saying?
ORESTES : The man who smuggled me off to Phokis, thanks to your foresight.
ELEKTRA : Him? Can it be? That man was the one trustworthy soul I could find in the house, the day Father died!
ORESTES : That’s who he is. Do not question me further.
ELEKTRA : [To the OLD MAN.] I bless you like the light of day!
I bless you as the savior of the house of Agamemnon!
How did you come? Is it really you—who pulled us up from the pit that day?
I bless your hands, I bless your feet, I bless the sweet roads you walked!
How strange you were beside me all that time and gave no sign.
Strange—to destroy me with lies when you had such sweet truth to tell.
Bless you, Father!—Yes, Father.
That is who I see when I look at you now.
There is no man on earth I have hated and loved like you on the one same day.
OLD MAN : Enough, now. As for all the stories in between—
there will be nights and days to unravel them, Elektra.
But for you two, standing here, I have just one word: act!
Now is the moment!
Now Klytaimestra is alone.
Now there is not one man in the house.
If you wait you will have to fight others, more skilled and more numerous. Think!
ORESTES : Well, Pylades, no more speeches.
As quick as we can into the house—after we pay our respects to the gods of this doorway.
[Exit ORESTES and PYLADES followed by the OLD MAN.]
ELEKTRA : King Apollo! Graciously hear them.
Hear me too! I have been devout, I have come to you often, bringing you gifts of whatever I had.
Now again I come with all that I have:
Apollo wolfkiller! I beg you!
I call out—I fall to my knees!
please send your mind over us, inform our strategies, show how the gods reward unholy action!
CHORUS : Look where he comes grazing forward, blood bubbling over his lips: Ares!
As a horizontal scream into the house go the hunters of evil, the raw and deadly dogs.
Not long now:
the blazing dream of my head is crawling out.
Here he comes like a stealing shadow, like a footprint of death into the rooms, stalking the past
with freshcut blood in his hands.
It is Hermes who guides him down a blindfold of shadow—straight to the finish line: not long now!
ELEKTRA : My ladies! The men are about to accomplish the deed—be silent and wait.
CHORUS : How? What are they doing?
ELEKTRA : She is dressing the urn. They are standing beside her.
CHORUS : But why did you come running out here?
ELEKTRA : To watch that Aigisthos doesn’t surprise us.
KLYTAIMESTRA : [within] AIAI IO.
Rooms filled with murder!
ELEKTRA : Someone inside screams—do you hear?
CHORUS : Yes I hear. It makes my skin crawl.
KLYTAIMESTRA : OIMOI TALAIN’.
Aigisthos, where are you?
ELEKTRA : There! Again! Someone calls out.
KLYTAIMESTRA : Oh child my child, pity the mother who bore you!
ELEKTRA : Yet you had little enough pity for him and none for his father!
CHORUS : Alas for the city.
Alas for a whole race thrown and shattered: the shape that followed you down the days is dying now, dying away.
KLYTAIMESTRA : OMOI.
I am hit!
ELEKTRA : Hit her a second time, if you have the strength!
KLYTAIMESTRA : OMOI MAL’ AUTHIS. Again!
ELEKTRA : If only Aigisthos could share this!
CHORUS : The curses are working.
Under the ground dead men are alive with their black lips moving, black mouths sucking on the soles of killers’ feet.
Here they come, hands soaked with red: Ares is happy!
Enough said.
ELEKTRA : Orestes, how does it go?
ORESTES : Good, so far—at least so far as Apollo’s oracle was good.
ELEKTRA : Is the creature dead?
ORESTES : Your good mother will not insult you anymore.
CHORUS : Stop! I see Aigisthos coming, yes, it is him.
ELEKTRA : Boys, get back!
ORESTES : Where do you see him—
ELEKTRA : There—marching right down on us full of joy.
CHORUS : Go quick to the place just inside the front door.
You have won the first round. Now for the second.
ORESTES : Don’t worry. We will finish this.
ELEKTRA : Hurry. Go to it.
ORESTES : Yes I am gone.
ELEKTRA : And leave this part to me.
CHORUS : Why not drop a few friendly words in his ear—so his moment of justice may come as a surprise.
[Enter AIGISTHOS.]
AIGISTHOS : Does anyone know where those Phokian strangers are?
People say they have news of Orestes dead in a chariot crash.
You!
yes you!—you’ve never been shy to speak your mind.
And obviously this matter most concerns you.
ELEKTRA : Yes of course I know, for I do keep track of the fortunes of the family.
AIGISTHOS : Where are they then, the strangers?—tell me.
ELEKTRA : Inside the house, for they’ve fallen upon the perfect hostess.
AIGISTHOS : And it’s true they bring a report of his death?
ELEKTRA : No—better: they have evidence, not just words.
AIGISTHOS : We can see proof?
ELEKTRA : You can, indeed, though it’s no pretty sight.
AIGISTHOS : Well this is good news. Unusual, coming from you.
ELEKTRA : Relish it while you can.
AIGISTHOS : Silence! I say throw open the gates! for every Mykenaian and Argive to see—in case you had placed empty hopes in this man—take my bit on your tongue or learn the hard way.
ELEKTRA : As for me, I am playing my part to the end.
I’ve learned to side with the winners.
[A shrouded corpse is disclosed with ORESTES and PYLADES standing beside it.]
AIGISTHOS : O Zeus! I see here a man fallen by the jealousy of god —but if that remark offends, I unsay it.
Uncover the eyes. Uncover it all.
I should pay my respects.
ORESTES : Uncover it yourself.
This isn’t my corpse—it’s yours.
Yours to look at, yours to eulogize.
AIGISTHOS : Yes good point. I have to agree.
You there—Klytaimestra must be about in the house—call her for me.
ORESTES : She is right here before you. No need to look elsewhere.
AIGISTHOS : OIMOI.
What do I see!
ORESTES : You don’t know the face?
AIGISTHOS : Caught! But who set the trap?
ORESTES : Don’t you realize yet that you’re talking to dead men alive?
AIGISTHOS : OIMOI.
I do understand. You are Orestes.
ORESTES : At last.
AIGISTHOS : I’m a dead man. No way out.
But let me just say—
ELEKTRA : No!
Don’t let him speak—by the gods! Brother—no speechmaking now!
When a human being is so steeped in evil as this one what is gained by delaying his death?
Kill him at once.
Throw his corpse out for scavengers to get.
Nothing less than this can cut the knot of evils inside me.
ORESTES : Get in with you, quickly.
This is no word game:
your life is at stake.
AIGISTHOS : Why take me inside?
If the deed is honorable, what need of darkness?
You aren’t ready to kill?
ORESTES : Don’t give me instructions, just get yourself in:
You will die on the spot where you slaughtered my father.
AIGISTHOS : Must these rooms see the whole evil of Pelops’ race, present and future?
ORESTES : They will see yours, I can prophesy.
AIGISTHOS : That is no skill you got from your father!
ORESTES : Your answers are quick, your progress slow. Go.
AIGISTHOS : You lead the way.
ORESTES : No you go first.
AIGISTHOS : Afraid I’ll escape?
ORESTES : You shall not die on your own terms.
I will make it bitter for you.
And let such judgment fall on any who wish to break the law:
kill them!
The sum of evil will be less.
[Exit ORESTES and AIGISTHOS, followed by ELEKTRA, into the house.]
CHORUS : O seed of Atreus:
you suffered and broke free,
you took aim and struck;
you have won your way through to the finish line.
[Exit CHORUS.]
ORESTES
by Euripides
INTRODUCTION
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning …
—W. H. AUDEN
When we first meet Orestes in Orestes, he is asleep onstage. This sets up a relationship between us and him that will continue through the play. To see Orestes flounder about in decisions and actions as the story proceeds is like watching someone twitch in his sleep and let out the occasional scream. He is present but opaque to us—driven by a dream of his own life that is nightmarishly clear to him on the inside but which he never communicates to us. We see flashes of his reasoning lit up by this or that crisis but we get no sense of the plan of his mind. His moral reactions are often bizarre, as when Tyndareus, grandfather of Orestes and father of Klytaimestra, denounces him for having murdered his mother. Orestes’ response is:
As a matter of fact, isn’t it all your fault for engendering her?
You ruined me!
(447–48)
All in all, Orestes is a peculiar customer—not exactly insane but strange and unknowable. His consciousness is entirely his own. And in this respect he is a typical Euripidean creation. Euripides introduced to the Greek tragic stage a concern for the solitary, inward self, for consciousness as a private content that might or might not match up with the outside appearance of a person, that might or might not make sense to an observer. He lived at a time when philosophers as well as artists were becoming intrigued by this difference between outside and inside, appearance and reality, and were advancing various theories about what truth is and where truth lies. As a tragic poet, Euripides had to confront a special version of the problem. Within a traditional poetic form like Greek tragedy, the truth has only one definition: it is identical with myth. The truth about Orestes was contained in the standard myth of his adventures. Euripides could rearrange its details but he was not at liberty to stage a play in which Orestes refrained from killing his mother. That would have been seen as absurd and untrue. Nor could Euripides present a play that did not have three speaking actors, a chorus of average citizens and a divine epiphany at the end. These were the parts of a legitimate tragedy. Yet we sense in all of Euripides’ playwriting a mind out of patience with this straitjacket of fixed truths and predictable procedures. He has revolutionary instincts. He wants to shatter and shock. He goes about it subversively. Leaving the external structure of the myth and the traditional form of the play intact, he allows everything inside to go a tiny bit awry. It creates a mad tension between content and form that builds to a point of explosion in the final scene.
So, for example, he uses the chorus, as was conventional, to comment on the action but he has them say incoherent or contradictory things from one choral ode to the next. He employs the standard device of a messenger speech to convey offstage events yet he employs it not once but twice and the second messenger is a sort of hysterical Trojan version of Venus Xtravaganza—a eunuch slave who speaks entirely in lyric verse (in the original production he would have sung his lines, probably soprano, to the accompaniment of a flute). Euripides throws in the eunuch for shock value and to make the end of the play more exasperating. He seems to prefer maximum exasperation in the final scene, where all the lines of the plot have been pushed to impasse and categories like good/evil, happy/unhappy, mortal/ immortal are sliding around so crazily that only a god can make things clear.
So he brings on a god to make things clear, the deus ex machina being a conventional way of tying off the ends of a Greek tragedy. But here too form and content are at odds. For the god in question (it is Apollo) dictates a series of solutions that make nonsense of all the actions and anguish of the characters up to that point. For example, he instructs Orestes, who happens to be holding his sword to the throat of a young girl named Hermione, to lower his weapon and marry her. Orestes merrily agrees to do so.
How should we read moments like this, where exasperation verges on farce? Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic. Saw the gods as ironic. Saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. A frightening idea. But at least it entails the assumption that Euripides himself was not playing. That he was a serious playwright who knew his target and took aim.
Another serious way to read a play like Orestes is as an indictment of the age and the society in which the playwright lived. His was a time of constant warfare, imperialist greed and astonishing political corruption, rather like our own. Euripides produced Orestes in 408 B.C. Later the same year, he left Athens and went to Macedonia, where he died in less than two years. There is no historical evidence to explain why a highly successful playwright would go into voluntary exile at the age of seventy-three. But it makes Orestes his last statement to the Athenians—and a wild, heartless, unconstruable statement it is. If I take it as a story of real people, I can find no character to like in the play. On the other hand, as an allegory or abstract design, it lacks all exactitude—seems to unfold like a bolt of cloth falling down stairs, spilling itself, random. Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.