AESCHYLUS THE ORESTEIA

Each of the three Athenian tragedians is unique: each has an utterly individual dramatic method. Aeschylus's is the largest in scale and 'reach', especially in the Oresteia. The Asechylean theater's cast of 'characters' includes:

a. Zeus. 'if that name pleases Him'.}
b. Gods and goddesses
c. Furies, Ghosts, the Dead, Chthonic Powers
d. Prophetesses: Cassandra. Pythia.
e. AristocratsProtagonists/
f. Democratic citizens; Chorus
g. Slaves (Watchman: Kilissa)
h. monsters; Titans; natural forces(Prometheus Bound)

No other world drama establishes all these levels of dramatic action in the same work. This means that Aeschylus often courts great incongruity but ‘delivers’ more power. (This is what Aristophanes claims in The FROGS)

The Agamemnon: The Story

The Orestes story is one of the most repeated myths in Greek drama and in subsequent European literature. (Hamlet is a variant of the story). Though in productions Clytemnestra often is made the major character, the major character, thematically, is Orestes who alone carries the evolutionary agenda of the trilogy from the old vendetta blood feuds of the aristocratic culture of the Mykenaeans (The Agamemnon) through the pharmakos phase of the suffering hero The Libation Bearers), to the establishment of enlightened divine (Delphi) and human law (Athens) and the divinely sanctioned civilized democracy (The Eumenides).

Orestes is also the truly heroic figure in the play, who heroically suffers as well as acts. He is similar to Eteocles in The Seven Against Thebes: the 'polluted' hero who takes on the curse of the community by becoming its pharmakos or scapegoat. Without the miracle performed by the gods in The Eumenides he would be the tragic hero who suffers terribly and is destroyed - like Eteocles.

Though we have lost the first two plays of the trilogy of which The Seven Against Thebes is the conclusion, the Orestes trilogy lets us imagine what the earlier trilogy must have been like: the violent and guilt-ridden family history that threatens to destroy a whole community, its curse working its way through the generations and into the community. In both trilogies, the pollution can be lifted from the community only by the hero willing to be scapegoat

From Shame Culture to Guilt Culture
It has been said that Homer wrote for and about a 'Shame' culture, and that Aeschylus wrote about and for a 'Guilt' culture The 'authoritative' version of the story appeared in Homer's The Odyssey. There, the goddess Athena tells the young hero, Telemachos, son of Odysseus, about Orestes, the model Telemachus should imitate. By avenging his father's murderers, Athena tells Telemachos, Orestes has won everlasting fame in the eyes of gods and men.

Aegisthus, not Clytemnestra, is mentioned as Agamemnon’s' murderer. The guilt of the wife and mother and her death by her son, though integral to the myth, was something Homer seemed reluctant to mention. In Homer's account there is no guilt, no Furies, no suffering: only glory as Orestes avenges his father. In a Shame culture, the worst thing that can happen to a hero is loss of honor, of fame, of his good name. This is the only true evil and the hero, like Sophokles’ Ajax, will rather die than live in dishonor.

It is the code of the epic hero; the great motive behind Achilles' refusal to fight in The Iliad. Any action is justified if it does not bring dishonor to one's name. It is the ethos of the Icelandic saga, the Anglo-Saxon world of Beowulf and of the samurai, or the warrior values of the Native American culture. It is built into our own culture, when an individual or a nation might feel it has been ‘dishonored’ in the eyes of the world.

In a Guilt culture actions are involved in concepts of pollution, of ethical contamination (guilt), and of the desire to purify oneself of such pollution by ritual action. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra live in the old, ‘epic’ Shame culture, but Orestes, as the play evolves, inhabits a guilt culture, in which the nature of his actions demand ritual purification. Guilt cultures involve ‘miasma’ and dark demonic spirits, like the Furies. By taking on the concepts of guilt, pollution and purification, and by willing to become a sacrificial victim, (pharmakos) not merely an avenger, Orestes 'lifts' the conflict out of the savage and primitive world of his parents and into the world where his actions can be put on trial. By becoming a matter of communal justice, the crime is released from Guilt culture terrors.

DIALECTIC STRUCTURE OF THE TRILOGY
The trilogy in its structure is evolutionary and dialectical. The First play, the Agamemnon (thesis) is Archaic in content and form, making somewhat awkward use of the new three-actor innovation of Sophokles and being predominantly Choric. The Second play The Libation Bearers (antithesis) is closer to Sophokles and Euripides, with its extended action between Orestes and Electra who are more prominent than the Chorus. The Third The Eumenides (synthesis) is unlike anything else in extant Greek tragedy: closer to comedy, such as Aristophanes, than to tragedy.

The trilogy is divided into three ethical worlds, symbolized by changes of scene. The first play is acted out in front of the Palace (Skene and orchestra) and this setting is exploited richly by Aeschylus. As this first play progresses the palace takes on more and more the inescapable history of guilt which, by the end of the play, claims two new victims. The Palace itself is an actor with its lurid action of setting the crimson carpet for Agamemnon to walk upon, then closing upon him and Cassandra like a fiendish trap, giving out the death-cries from within.

The scene of the second play is the tomb of Agamemnon (at the center of the Orchestra?) with the Palace still in the background. It seems history has a ghastly way of repeating itself, as once more there are screams from inside the palace and the doors again swing open to show two dead bodies (male and female) and a killer standing over them. But the strong emphasis of the prior ritual at the grave changes the nature of this second killing.

(In the third play, we have traveled from the West (the Peloponnese) to East via Delphi to Athens, and each of these scenes (Delphi and the Athens law court) is a stage of Orestes purification and acquittal. These locations mark the evolutionary stages of Greek civilization taking over 700 years. Orestes, in The Eumenides, is 700 years old! Aeschylus, therefore, plotted his trilogy on a grand scale of dramatic architecture, needing the three plays to show the working out of a long historical/cultural process: the Argument of the trilogy. This Aeschylean scale of drama attracted later dramatists: Shakespeare’s History Cycles, Corneille’s ‘Roman trilogy’ (Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte) Ibsen’s 12-play Realist Cycle and, closer to home, August Wilson's African American Cycle.

The idea of cultural evolution was natural to Greek thought. The Greeks’ idea of the founding of Olympos, the civilized home of the gods, was an evolutionary one: the divine civilization emerging only after struggle from monstrous chaos and barbarism, and needing to be maintained actively, day by day - a continuous warfare with the demons or trolls of the spirit within as well as without. One Greek thinker posited that humans had evolved from earlier animal species. This evolutionary aspect of Greek culture informs the Oresteia.

For the Greeks, civilization was a choice and an endlessly strenuous activity. The amount of effort Greek culture put into being civilized, in converting a difficult natural landscape into a civilized civic terrain, can be guessed at by looking at the great Graeco-Roman ruins in the middle-east and Europe. The quarrying and lifting of marble into blocks of many tons to make exquisite and massive temples, statues, stadia and theaters, converting metallic ore into statues and artifacts, clay into ceramics, bronze into sculpture, the human body into a work of art, in dance, athletics; and the human mind through song, poetry drama, rhetoric, history, science, medicine and philosophy: and above all into civic rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and the political arts of the polis or city-state was an astonishing process of recreating humanity beyond its natural condition.

This is to take the material world surrounding you and difficult human nature with all its passions and appetites, and re-organize both into a free civilized community. And all this was done on a standard of living typical of the third world today - and by a relatively tiny population whose works, though only a tiny fraction remains of what has been lost, fill whole sections of major museums of the world today. This culture valued civilization to the point of obsession more perhaps, than any other.

So to claim the Oresteia is a dialectical trilogy dramatizing the painful evolution of civilization out of barbarism is quite in accord with the whole spirit of Greek culture. In this great argument, not only do human beings evolve from the vengeful to civilized: so do their ideas of the gods. Your gods are as civilized as you are. The gods of the first play are seen as as vindictive as the violent humans.

In the second play Zeus, through Apollo, guides the action with a rough sense of Justice, beyond revenge; whereas, in the last play, violence gives way to the civilized activity of debate, investigation, self-searching, argument and judgment by vote. No one is killed. All this is shown in a tragic theater, which is itself an indication of achieved civilization.

It is only in the third play (the synthesis) that a culture is arrived at in which an institution such as theatre could emerge. Whereas one cannot imagine any of the characters of the first two plays onstage attending a drama, one can imagine dramatic art addressing the community we see onstage at the close The Eumenides. In fact, it seems the theatre audience itself takes part in the final theatrical tableau. The theater audience was addressed throughout the play (as an extension of the jury) and was invited to take part in the final torchlight procession, to be part of the drama, as the drama became part of the polis. In the Oresteia the Athenian theater dramatizes the process of its own coming into being.

The evolution of the different levels of the trilogy is from the Mykenaean Palace culture with its violent, vendetta-based justice, to the temple of Delphi, the holiest shrine of all Greeks where no violence is permitted, to the polis and its and law court in democratic Athens supplanting tribal and family loyalty with loyalty to the polis. It is an evolution from savagery to achieved civic life:

(i) An evolution from family-tribal vendetta justice to civic law
(ii) From aristocratic, Palace culture to democratic.
(iii) From ritual vengeance in the Libation Bearers to rationalism
(the law court)

This evolution also would parallel the personal experience of every Athenian male citizen's initiation into adulthood and citizenship. The Athenian male was born and raised at home but, like Orestes, removed from it at an early age. After leaving home, at about 7 years old, he was educated into the culture of his community, into its holiest rituals and ceremonies. He was rigorously trained to become the warrior-citizen, now severed from the female realm of familial life. Orestes’ donation of his lock of hair was an Athenian ritual of attaining the age of the ephebe. In this play he attains it by killing his mother! His entry (at age 18) into adulthood would entail becoming the young warrior-citizen, ready to take up arms and civic duties - such as at the Areopagus where Orestes is tried. The 'huge' archetypal evolutionary' movement of the trilogy could find a parallel in the individual evolutionary experience of every ephebe in the audience.

The trilogy also has been read as:

(i) The displacement of powerful female deities by male deities.(A

divine-human patriarchal take-over)
(ii) The evolution of a theodicy from savage to Olympian gods:
ZEUS evolves as humans evolve.

The power of the Oresteia is that all these different levels – or perspectives – interweave, fugally, like counterpoint in music.

The Agamemnon
1. This is the longest of all the Greek tragedies. Aeschylus is laying out, a dramatic argument on the grand scale, interweaving different stories within his plot.

‘Overdetermined’ Guilt
When Agamemnon walks on the blood-red carpet into the palace, to be trapped in a net and executed by his wife, Clytemnestra, this action is 'overdetermined' by a whole cluster or net of guilty circumstances involving Argos and Troy:

(a) Thyestes' abduction of Atreus wife
(b) Atreus serving Thyestes flesh of his own sons to eat.
(c) Thyestes' curse on the house of Atreus
(d) Paris' offence against the goddesses
(e) His abduction of Helen
(d) Agamemnon's and Menelaus' decision to destroy Troy
(e) The killing of Iphigenia
(f) Aegisthus’ return to avenge his father on the house of Atreus
(g) Clytemnestra’s adultery with Aegisthus
(h) The deaths of the Greek and Trojan warriors over Helen
(We hear ‘the people’ are resentful against the leaders over the
dead: of seeing their men go off to return as little urns of ashes).
(i) The ‘impious’ destruction of Troy’s temples
(j) The enslavement of Cassandra, Apollo’s priestess.

WHERE DOES ONE START?
All these circumstances together are caught up in the net of Agamemnon’s murder making it impossible to announce a beginning to the endless chain of causation- guilt-retribution. In other words, how can the experience be experienced as Tragedy: adequately, rationally, emotionally, aesthetically, and communally? (The trilogy is ‘open’ at both ends: the beginning is difficult to determine: the end is only cautiously optimistic).

It is the Chorus, above all, which links the chain together and searches to connect these violent actions to the will of Zeus, i.e. to some cosmic meaning or sense.. This is one of the profoundest insights of the trilogy: that the rage and vindictive and passionate transgressions of the protagonists must be transmuted, steadies, and enlarged through the communal imagination. There can be no confident starting point: only a cluster or atmosphere of horrors out of which the action rises. Which is why the play is so difficult at first reading. It is the communal voice of the Chorus that contains the Memory, looking back and forward, desperately searching out a pattern, some evidence of Zeus. The protagonists (apart from Cassandra) exist in a more limited, selfish and violently active dimension.

The atmosphere of this first play of the trilogy, then, is one of anguished perplexity, of being trapped in a seemingly endless sequence of violence. Therefore, its opening action and image, of the Watchman of the guilty Palace peering into the darkness for light, for the destructive fire from Troy, 'echoed' and flashed across all Greece, is as appropriate, as a symbol as the opening of Hamlet; of the nervous and anxious guards peering into the night on the battlements of Elsinore. (In actual performance time the trilogy would have opened in morning dimness and gradually grow lighter, with Orestes invocation to the sun at the appropriate moment.)

Complex Present: the bonfire relay.
Why has Clytemnestra ordered the bonfire of beacons? (Celebration? Warning? Both? The Watchman/Sentry is not only anxious for the light: he is fearful of the reality of the palace he is guarding with Clytemnestra waiting for Agamemnon. She has planned the signal from Troy, ostensibly to celebrate the victory of her husband, but actually to be warned he is coming so she can plot his murder. She has no time to lose for Agamemnon would soon find out about her lover, Aegisthus.

The Watchman does not know of her motives, but his uneasiness, his unwillingness to say just what he knows alerts the audience to be on guard against the deception and double-speech on Clytemnestra's part.

The trilogy begins with destructive fire and ends with creative fire: the torchlight procession of the close of The Eumenides} It begins with the destruction of a city by fire, (Troy) and ends with torchlight and the establishing of a lawful city (Athens)

PROLOGUE – the Watchman
The Watchman's speech is the Prologue preceding the Parodos of the first Chorus.
Though not as dramatic as the Prologue of the Eumenides, (which is a whole action involving the Prophetess, Orestes, Apollo, Hermes and the ghost of Clytemnestra) we can see what an advance it is over the Choric opening of The Persians, or the monologue-prologue of Eteocles in Seven Against Thebes. For it is a little drama in itself, in which something momentous happens (the blaze) and which ends with him calling upon the Chorus, which now enters.

PARODOS: Chorus of Old Men (acted by ephebes)
All three Choruses in the trilogy: the old men, the female libation bearers and the monstrous female Furies are examples of the most brilliant use of the Chorus. In this play, as old men who contain the communal memory, the history of the palace, but who do not know what has happened at Troy

Q. Why OLD men?
A. The young men are dead save for the few who accompany Agamemnon home.

The Chorus will try to link together, all the bewildering strands of crime and guilt and violence surrounding the protagonists, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Cassandra, and Aegisthus.
The Chorus is the dramatist's means of revealing the wider, linking patterns behind these individual acts of violence. and though the complications of the linkage seem to threaten anarchy they will show themselves to be the ways in which Zeus is bringing order to this world, (the Chorus’s fervent hope)

DIALECTIC
There is no law without transgression. Civilization emerges from the violence it must overcome. For a civilization to erect a system of laws, it must first encounter that which it prohibits or regulates. Without murder, theft, cruelty, there would be no laws against them and therefore no culture of laws. In the same way, wisdom can only come from suffering: pathei/mathos as we saw in The Persians. In this play, the Agamemnon, the phrase is tragically iterated.

The nature of the Chorus and its imagery: its 'ritual' or 'ceremonial' function is of tremendous value in immediately universalizing the action of the drama; and no drama since the Greek has been able successfully to do this.

a. After chanting that ten years ago Menelaus and Agamemnon sailed for Troy the Chorus introduces the imagery of the eagles, screaming their rage at the robbing of their nest (Helen) then, rising above the circling eagles, (birds of Zeus) the Chorus imagines the gods, including Zeus, hearing the cry of the brother-eagles, and sending down Furies (war) of Vengeance. As we will see, later, it is typical of Aeschylus’s imagery that it changes, metamorphosizes as we listen; the victimized hare image ‘spreads’ or ‘bleeds’ from the sacrificed daughter to the attack on the city of Troy itself. It is a profound aspect of Aeschylus’s moral vision that no act stands alone: it inevitably becomes a cluster (or network) of causes and consequences . For this reason, it is so difficult to pinpoint a single origin or cause of events and why these Choruses are so complexly questioning, searching for explanation. It is the exact opposite of the complacent certainty of e.g. the conventional mystery or thriller, which triumphantly pulls out the solution at the end like a rabbit from a hat. Aeschylus is a philosopher more than a prosecutor.

b. So far, the imagery and description is that of heroic, justified indignation, sanctioned by the gods: a simple matter But the silent appearance of Clytemnestra, soon switches the train of thought onto darker tracks and the eagles re-appear in the verses, but this time as violators' of rights - for the pregnant hare is also Troy and its people who will be destroyed by the brothers' armies and the men of both armies who also will be killed. and, for the first time, the 'net' image appears and we hear that Artemis, (the ‘goddess of ecology') is angry at this destruction (the pregnant hare symbolic for continuing life, as well as for Troy.)
[In Homer, Artemis, Apollo Aphrodite and Ares fought on the side of Troy: Athena, Hera, Poseidon fought for the Greeks: Zeus stayed neutral]

c. Artemis demands that, if Agamemnon is going to destroy the innocent people of Troy, he must sacrifice an innocent from his own family (must suffer what he inflicts on others). Artemis will allow the winds to carry the thousand ships to Troy only on this condition and the priest, Kalchas, tells the king of this. (The strands of the net increase)

d. At this point, the Chorus, in anguished reaction, calls upon

"Zeus, whoever you are/If any name please you.."

to bring the light of reason and justice into this horror acknowledging that Zeus teaches wisdom out of suffering. in other words, the Chorus admits it cannot find order or justice in the situations it is going to narrate; but, already it is searching for these, unlike the 'blind' protagonists Aegisthus and Clytemnestra who blasphemously think of Zeus as their personal agent of revenge.

e. The Chorus searches for a 'vision' larger than that of the protagonists' conflicting wills. Only Cassandra, however, will see the whole picture. After calling on Zeus, the Chorus can now bring itself to tell of the horrible sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia by Agamemnon.

Agamemnon is grief-stricken, but, as leader of the armies, he cannot drop the expedition that angers Artemis. He is shown as tragically caught, and performing the sacrifice, like Abraham with Isaac, in "fear and trembling" and in sorrow. And the Chorus describes the situation - in pitiable detail.

Note the ambiguity. Agamemnon is tragic, but terribly guilty and in his pride, he goes along with Artemis's demand. Again, it is the tragic ’net’ of interweaving different motives. The Chorus recalls the evil logic of the king's decision and the army's connivance (it, too is guilty) despite the pitiable terror of the young girl. It is possible that the dancing Chorus re-enacted the sacrifice, (at the ‘thymele’ including lifting Iphigenia onto the altar).

f. Still hoping that somehow Zeus will bring justice out of all this violence, the Chorus turns to Clytemnestra. The account of Iphigenia's death reminds us that this is her mother, waiting for the king to return.

JUSTICE AND ZEUS- EVOLUTION OF GREEK IDEAS
One change in Greek Civilization from its aristocratic “Palace’ and “Shame culture, to its new democracy with its evolved system of laws, is that Aeschylus should feel the need to show that Zeus is just: "To justify the ways of Zeus to Man." Perhaps an impossible brief, but Aeschylus's answer is as good as any. Justice, not Order or Power, is the prime concern of a democracy. The aristocratic Homer did not require the gods to be just. His view of them is rather like that of the smaller nations towards the superpowers., It recognizes the realpolitik of divine power. Smaller powers have to live with the ‘interests’ of the superpowers, which are concerned with Order, not Justice. A United States president (H.W. Bush) proclaimed a New World Order, not a new rule of Law, to protect the nation’s own interests. His son's giovernment refuses to recognize the International Court of Justice.

In the Homeric world-view, a superpower like Zeus, or the U.S., does not welcome an International Court of Justice. Laws are what little nations obey. Aeschylus, however, is more like the founders of the United Nations and the world court (his trilogy ends in a court of law) than like Homer’s or the Superpower’s view of things. He demands Justice from history and from divine providence. An unjust Zeus is intolerable. So the Chorus sings

"Justice teaches us
Knowledge is the fruit of suffering" (pathei/mathos)

and
Sing songs of sorrow but let the good prevail

And the trilogy will end joyfully:”Zeus and Fate are reconciled”. Fate (Moira) is how things must be. That they are also just is a cosmic blessing from Zeus.

The Chorus’s account of the death of Iphigenia builds up to the entrance of Clytemnestra who now comes before us with an ominous history; therefore, we can only see her speeches as sinisterly ambiguous. She announces that she has prepared for one event: the fall of Troy, while actually preparing for another (the murder of her daughter's killer, Agamemnon). And she introduces into the play the theme of the war of the sexes: she sees herself as a woman with a man's heart, forced into the role of being submissive to Agamemnon whom she despises, and, therefore, proud of her own creativity in thinking up the train of beacons of fire across the Greek landscape.

For the Athenian audience, the spectacle of a woman acting like this might have been a striking anomaly. However, one of the features of all Greek tragedy is that, by returning to the myths of the Heroic Age, it was able to present portraits of powerful and courageous aristocratic women acting with far greater freedom than women in the democratic polis would be permitted.

Clytemnestra recounts her strategy with much self-congratulation, which helps Aeschylus build up her formidable presence, totally capable of the two murders she will commit. She speaks one thought which is ominously echoed later: that, in the sacking of Troy, the Greeks should not harm the shrines of the city's gods (13) When the Messenger arrives he tells how the Greek army in Troy :

Destroyed its altars, its shrines
And scattered its seed to the avenging winds

thus offending all the gods. Another strand in the net of guilt.

And the next Choric Ode takes up this image of the net. again. This Ode would have been elaborately mimed in dance. It begins confidently proclaiming that the war against Troy is a just punishment for Paris's seduction of Helen and Troy's acceptance of her: but, as the Ode continues, it describes the anger of the Greek people at the deaths of their sons in what they now see as an unjust war. The Ode undercuts the Victory, as well as giving yet one more reason - the people's anger - for the Furies’ pursuit of Agamemnon .

a. The Messenger (Herald’s) Speech, from its opening, is as dramatic as the superb Messenger speech in The Persians because Aeschylus makes the messenger's arrival one of tremendous emotion He is one of the few survivors who has returned from the war alive, and not as ashes in an urn, as the Chorus bitterly described. He also 'builds up' positively the character of Agamemnon: a character that had taken some hard moral knocks in previous accounts by the Chorus. So we see another side of the king: the revered leader and conqueror, the righteous agent of Zeus who, however, destroyed the Trojan temples. (Again overstepping, as with the sacrifice of his daughter).

b After hearing part of his news, the Chorus hints to him that the home situation that Agamemnon must face (his wife having taken Aegisthus as her lover) but it dare not speak openly allowing us to fathom that they live under a form of tyranny from which Agamemnon might rescue them.

c. The Messenger's speech then includes a bitterly realistic account of war-campaign suffering (something Aeschylus experienced first-hand) which also reminds us that this was Agamemnon’s suffering, to while his wife stayed at home with Aegisthus which again, partly rehabilitates the king (for Aeschylus's vision is complex.) Agamemnon is not a monster but someone trapped into committing monstrous actions, like Clytemnestra and, later, Orestes.
-
Clytemnestra’s Speech-
First, to the Elders, a triumphal justification of her ‘beacon strategy” What rankles is that she is not respected as a ruler because she is a woman. Aeschylus, it has been noted knew of a Greek woman as strong as Clytemnestra, - Artemesia of Halicarnassus, who fought on the Persian side, and commanded her own warship. (trireme) in the battle of Salamis. She survived, unlike many who perished in the battle, by ruthlessly ramming one of the ships of her Persian ally, sinking it and drowning all the men!. (Cf. Herodotus) Her speech to the messenger is one of ambiguities and brazen lies, pleasant sounding untruth In reply, the messenger tells the unpleasant truth about Menelaos and the missing ships. Are the gods punishing the hubris of Agamemnon and Menelaos?

The satyr play will be the non-tragic story of Proteus, Menelaos and Helen)

The Messenger’s speech concludes with an account of the hardships and horrors of fighting long years abroad, and of the losses of men. It is out of this suffering that the dubious ‘glory’ of victory is won. He also adds that the Greeks destroyed the temples of Troy - the crime that Clytemnestra had warned against. More and more, the figure of Agamemnon is accumulating layers of guilt, not from any disposition to evil, but symbolically, as the fate of the Leader whose every decision traverses a minefield of potential transgressions..

Exit Messenger actor to become Agamemnon or Cassandra
The Long Choral Ode gives him time to change mask and costume into either of these roles. My guess is that he changes to the Agamemnon role.

Chorus
The metaphor of the lion cub in the house. (It begins as the Chorus’s ambiguous account of Helen but as it progresses, the lion could be Paris, too, or Orestes, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra. It is typical of Aeschylean metaphors and imagery that they accumulate accretions, linking separate associations as they ‘drift’ from one designation to another.

Enter Agamemnon, chariot, and retinue, Cassandra
His entrance, in a chariot, would be along a Parodos in the Orchestra in front of the palace doors. He is accompanied by ‘spear carriers’ with Cassandra behind him in the chariot. The whole effect would be of royal magnificence. He is the master of the masculine external world, its conqueror. Clytemnestra will reveal she controls the feminine internal world, behind the closed doors. Aeschylus brilliantly uses the symbolism of the contest between these two spaces.

The Chorus addresses an ambiguous greeting to Agamemnon hinting that all is not well at home, in the Internal world, behind the closed doors. Agamemnon has entered a treacherous space. All the Protagonists stand in a zone of danger, observed by the Chorus from its place of greater safety (the Orchestra). The separation of the protagonists from the Chorus marks out two radically different zones of action – even of reality. The Chorus is closer to the audience not just physically, but also metaphorically. Like the audience, it is reactively more than actively engaged: observing the protagonists in their demarcated space with a similar appalled fascination, as if they are from another dimension of reality Agamemnon’s militant speech shows he is dangerous to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. His account of the sack of Troy, his intention of setting up a tribunal to judge the guilty at home all point to him being dangerously resourceful. Clytemnestra must act quickly.

Clytemnestra's ambiguous greeting to him, therefore, is filled with double meanings. There is a hidden reference to her grief at Iphigenia's death and a similarly concealed reference to lethal 'net' (868) The missing 'child' (‘paed’ in Greek, not 'son' ) whose absence Clytemnestra mentions, implies Iphigenia as well as Orestes. Her expressed ‘joy’ at Agamemnon's return disguises that this is from her desire to kill him!

She therefore enters a ‘contest’ with him to make him commit a crime of arrogance - walking the purple tapestries – as if to put the seal on all his accumulated guilts. Theatrically, it is a brilliant combination of plot with metaphor – perhaps the most powerful in all theater, as it makes the actor’s very act of descending from his advantageous position in the chariot to descend, walking the carpet into the house tense with grim premonition.

Agamemnon sense the danger:”And now, as I step down this crimson path/May no jealous god survey me”.. The senses of menace will be amplified by Clytemnestra’s triumphant call to “Zeus, grant me my prayers” and Cassandra’s terrifying (and terrified) speech. The zone of the Protagonists (the skene) has become lethally ambiguous: a treacherous space where past, present and future all at once drastically collide.

The deservedly famous blood-red (purple) carpet is another wonderful Aeschylean cluster of sinister associations:

a. Asiatic (Trojan) hubris, pomp
b. An affront to the gods
c, A struggle for power: male vs. female. Clytemnestra's victory
d. The bloody history of the house of Atreus
e, Agamemnon's bloody character - Troy, Iphigenia.
f. His own bloody death by Clytemnestra
g. And, subliminally, sexual associations of the blood-red path
issuing from the interior - in the Greek theater the realm of the
feminine.

Clytemnestra's cry of joy to ZEUS “Your will be done” when Agamemnon walks into the house is a huge irony, for Zeus' 'will' will be done in ways she does not suspect. Zeus’ larger plan fatally intersects with her limited one and it will destroy her – much as the ‘murdering ministers’ that Lady Macbeth calls upon will destroy her. All through the play, the Chorus seeks out a more adequate, total vision of events: the vast complexity of what ‘the will of Zeus’ is controlling and accomplishing: whereas the passionate protagonists, Klytemnesra, Agamemnon, Aegisthus, confidently enlist Zeus to their tunnel-vision causes. While the protagonists might be variously clever in operating events, the Chorus is more wise and, as in this Choral Ode, as the King and Queen walk into the house, are seeking a more adequate understanding of Zeus’s will behind the events.

Chorus – Cassandra-Clytemnestra This is the longest section in the play and it is a dialogue of the dispossessed: the slave girl and the helpless Elders.

The Chorus’ chant of fear, foreboding, superbly contrasts with Clytemnestra’s confident enlisting Zeus’s will to her own agenda. Clytemnestra and Cassandra repeat the earlier contest between husband and wife on entering the house: This time Clytemnestra. loses.
Cassandra’s 'wild, barbaric' outcries gradually compose themselves into the most total human vision in the whole trilogy: of past, present and future. Aeschylus gives this to a slave girl who is not Greek. In a dialogue of the dispossessed, the foreign slave girl and the helpless and disregarded old men,

The total vision of Cassandra
Cassandra not only sees the past crimes and the Furies haunting the house, she, alone, sees the future, of Orestes, avenging her death and ultimately lifting the curse on the house. Apollo’s curse on Cassandra was that her prophecies, though true, would never be believed: but at the moment she is about to enter the house, the Chorus believes her so that it seems the god has forgiven her and lifted the curse. Unlike the other protagonists, Cassandra shares the Choric vision. For the first time, Protagonist and Chorus are in accord and Cassandra sees the whole picture, which the Chorus could merely search for: the plan of Zeus behind the chaotic actions.

The only individual to understand the whole plan of Zeus is the slave girl. [In the next play, the protagonists, Orestes and Electra join with the slave Chorus as equals, sharing the same vision and goals. Thus, throughout the trilogy, the Protagonist is becoming less remote and aristocratic, less arrogantly at odds with the communal mind, closer to the democratic audience sitting in the theater.

Then come the death cries from within the palace, to be repeated in the next play. At this point, the Chorus disintegrates .Instead of a unified, communal voice, it splits up into twelve discordant voices, disputing with each other. This implies the communal disarray following the palace coup; and when the doors again open Clytemnestra emerges on the ecclyclema with its two corpses, male and female, taunting and facing down the horrified Chorus. [This same theatrical image will be repeated at the end of the next play.] The theme of total disunity expands as the palace now becomes the enemy of the populace and tyranny is established.

Aeschylus gives Clytemnestra a magnificently lurid boast as she exults in the murder:

He dropped and spewed his lifeblood out
In a crimson shower. His blood
Spattered me like dew. I gloried in it,
As fields in springtime glory in the rain (Raphael/McLeish)

Her speech justifies the murder, bringing up Agamemnon’s murderous sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. The Chorus sees this act of revenge setting up a chain reaction, trapping the House in an endless vendetta; whereas Clytemnestra offers to come to a truce with the Fury haunting the house.

The past is past, and we must swallow it;
For the future, let Fate
Settle on some other house,
Wear others down with self-inflicted doom.
I have riches, a store of wealth,
But I’d give it all
To see that murdering madness
Gone from these halls forever.

(Analogy with Lady Macbeth “A little water clears us of this deed”.)

Aegisthus, when he enters, declares the murder of Agamemnon to be Justice. He has at last avenged the horrifying crime against his family, the Thyestean cannibal feast of the father being lured to eat the flesh of his murdered sons. Both he and Clytemnestra vainly believe they can stop the sequence of retribution and can appropriate Zeus’s Justice for their own ends. In this vendetta concept of justice, all such ideas are fatally one-sided, and beget endless repetition.

Some new concept of Justice needs to evolve from the blundering, vengeful humans. This is what Zeus is setting out to achieve with the unpromising human material he has to work with. Aeschylus’s Zeus is not the vengeful ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” god of primitive and savage theodicy

The crime of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus cannot be simply set aside, if a society of laws is to evolve. But the vendetta code of Justice traps the human race in endless violence. The cycle cries out for the emergence of the selfless hero, the suffering hero, the pharmakos.who kills reluctantly, not from revenge but from a sense of Justice as dictated by a god – the god Apollo, no longer the vengeful god who tormented Cassandra, but now a proclaimer and upholder of Law in a new holy site, Delphi.

Before it can arrive at Delphi, however, the cycle must undergo new suffering with a new kind of Hero, Orestes in The Libation Bearers. . Through Orestes, the self-sacrificing hero, the Zeus of the Oresteia sets out to evolve the kind of human race that could establish the democratic city of Aeschylus’s Athens and its enlightened gods. The kind of city that could assemble to appreciate the passionate and cerebral dialectics of Athenian theater, for example.



THE LIBATION BEARERS/THE EUMENIDES
The Libation Bearers.

SCENE;
Agamemnon's tomb: a holy site. (Thymele: the altar of Dionysos at the centre of the Orchestra) The dead king’s subterranean spirit is felt throughout the play. Therefore there are two 'fathers invoked: Zeus 'above' and Agamemnon 'below'. 'Hermes' is the god-messenger of both fathers. Orestesaddresses all three. Hermes = Messenger of Zeus: Guide to the Dead.

There are two scenes acted out in the play:
(a) The Tomb (Centre of orchestra) the site of the ritual
(b) The Palace Site of pollution and of power. Of repeated violent action

CHARACTERS
Orestes, the exile is the 'pharmakos' - the hero who takes on the guilt of the community. Though he is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and heir of their conflict, he will represent a break with the vendetta-justice opf “an eye for an eye”
Orestes’ action is not vengeance but obedience to divine law. This is an ‘abstract’ mission for an adolescent hero who must be ritually inculcated in ‘embodying’ his father.
Pylades the friend, and spokesman for Apollo.
Chorus: slave women from Troy: (brought by Agamemnon)
These exile and 0utcasts above join together against the tyrants:
KILISSA and Servants
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus The old order about to be swept away.

ACTION
(a) A long ritual preparation at the tomb for the killing;
To build Orestes as the holy and just killer.
To revive the spirit of the angry father below. Orestes must ‘embody’ him
To gain the sanction of the father above (Zeus).

REVERSING THE ACTION OF AGAMEMNON
Contrast in arrivals: the ‘arrogant’ Father vs. the self-effacing Son. There, the queen used deceit to lure Agamemnon into the Palace. Now the visitor, Orestes, uses deceit to kill Clytemnestra. Orestes exiled at the beginning, is an exile at the end. But he has 'raised' the Furies and so brought the old vendetta-law into the open, for judgment. As pharmakos or scapegoat, he has shown a way out.

DIALOGUE
In this play, the dialogue is far simpler, less 'packed' with reference, metaphor and imagery than the earlier play. Neither the dark history of the Palace, nor the history of the Trojan War needs to be recapitulated deeply. The longest section of dialogue, also, takes the form of ritual 'kommos' or hymn. When this ritual ‘kommos’ between the children and the Chorus is over, the action is swift and ‘Sophoclean’. The language of the kommos is eerie: a dialogue with the dead father and with the divine. It is a ritual to get the dead Father to come alive again and spiritually enter the Son.

In Orestes his avenging father must be return to life and he must be reborn as a new kind of hero, the pharmakos. who will suffer. It is language reaching down to the fearful and occult but also straining after holiness and purity of motive. The play seems 'static' but it is a very powerful gathering up of energies and purposes, as Orestes 'grows' into the tragic avenger through the ritualistic kommos he shares with Electra and the Chorus of slave women.

It is the play that Euripides and Sophokles directly competed with.

Orestes resembles Eteocles in The Seven Against Thebes. That is, we see him preparing for his supreme action, being 'invested' in his role, by Electra & the Chorus. And, because what he has to do is not only dangerous but also terrible -killing his mother - he needs to be 'psyched up' for the action. He begins the action of obeying the orders of the god, without any emotional investment in the action. The ritual at the grave and the details of the desecration of his father’s corpse, provide this emotional and holy anger and make him identify with his father. It is Electra and the Chorus who instill this ‘primitive’ vengeance in him. They reconnect him with the sources of his action of nemesis: not rational Apollo but the Furies of his father

But not only this: Orestes has a number of reasons for killing Agamemnon's murderers:

To avenge his exile
To regain his throne and fortune
To avenge his father
To save Argos from tyranny
To obey Apollo

The ritual ceremony is to get him to act from the right motives: to subordinate the selfish or vengeful motives, such as Clytemnestra had acted from, to the motives of justice and obedience to the gods. The Chorus puts him through the emotional incentives he must incorporate and transcend. Thus he will kill his mother reluctantly, needing the words of APOLLO to be repeated by Pylades as he hesitates. The killing in this play, though it again echoes, like a nightmare, the death cries from the palace and the two bodies revealed as in the first play, is a progress to a ‘higher’ level of action. It is ritualized action. So what looks at first undramatic on the part of Aeschylus, is actually tremendously absorbing: the idea of the play is greater than a revenge-plot.

Orestes and Hamlet.
Though the dramatic character of Hamlet is more varied, ‘shaded’ and individualized than Orestes, the action of revenge he is involved in is cruder. Hamlet never is able to be convincingly the avenger of his father. The guilt of his mother, Gertrude, is evaded, while killing Claudius, almost in self-defense, has none of the horror of killing Clytemnestra. By killing Claudius casually, and almost by accident neither Hamlet nor Shakespeare has to engage with the ethical problems of revenge. The plot of Hamlet is actually revenge-melodrama ‘raised’ to tragic interest but evading its ethical dilemma.

For Aeschylus’s hero, Orestes, such an action of revenge required a tremendous spiritual/ritual preparation. Unlike Shakespeare, Aeschylus is less interested in the ‘personality’ of his hero’s character than in the complex ethics of his actions and their role in establishing an evolution towards Justice.

There are many ideas 'in' Hamlet. But The Oresteia is itself a dramatized idea, or concept. It realizes its Concept in its action: That is, in Greek tragedy, the action is always adequate to the idea:
In Elizabethan drama, much of the situation is superfluous to the idea. To put this differently: Watching the action of a Greek tragedy (the arming of Eteocles, the tragic learning of the Persians and Xerxes) is watching the careful unfolding of a concept. The myth is chosen and reworked by the dramatist to express only the idea of the play.

Watching a play like Hamlet is watching a pre-existing, complicated plot-story (or play), which is adapted by the dramatist to contain ideas, often tangentially related to the plot. There is great interest in seeing the interaction of the complex details of the story and the pressure of the ethical plot; but in the end I think the story wins out over the plot. The ‘tragic intention’ of HAMLET can be lost in the fascination with the story and its entertaining ‘set piece’ actions: The play within the play; Ophelia going mad; Polonius getting stabbed; Laertes and Hamlet’s duel; the interchanges between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and so on.

Even if there is a profound ‘truth’ here; that the sheer complexity of life-events can’t easily be shaped into clear ethical meaning; this very truth is likely to get lost in the entertainment value of the story. (Cf. H.D.F. KITTO: FORM AND MEANING IN DRAMA) Both the ceremonial occasion of the Greek tragic performance and the familiar nature of the mythic sources allow plot and argument to merge as one, as a unity. It is the exact opposite of melodrama in which the actions are greatly excessive to the 'idea'.

Apollo as director of the action
The plot: Clytemnestra dreams she is feeding a serpent at her breast. Terrified of the spirit of dead Agamemnon, she sends her slave women and Electra with libations to pour on the grave just at the moment when Orestes and Pylades, have come, in disguise, to present a false story of Orestes death in order to get into the palace and kill the murderers.

Clytemnestra's dream is an ironic action ‘directed’ by Apollo. By frightening Clytemnestra into sending the women to the tomb, the god ensures that Orestes and Pylades will have allies in their action. Not just allies, but active persuaders, for the CHORUS spurs on Orestes by telling him just how Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed and mutilated hs father, thus motivating Orestes to the proper spirit of vengeance.

PROLOGUE
Orestes, the returning exile, is approaching manhood (his cutting the lock of hair is the Greek ephebe’s ritual action on attaining majority). However, the first act Orestes must perform on ‘becoming a man’ is to kill his mother! So terrible is this action that he will need a careful ritual preparation by his sister and the Chorus.
Orestes’ first words are to the god, Hermes, to speak to the 'father' below. A seeminglymute actor, Pylades accompanies him.

Agamemnon, now he is in his grave, can be seen as multiply wronged: murdered, mutilated, and dishonored. Aeschylus now 'introduces' the CHORUS as part of the drama. And the Chorus will be a major actor, almost a protagonist. Orestes recognizes Electra, though she does not recognize him. He then retires to a position in view of the audience but hidden from the women, and watches and listens, sizing up the situation.

2. The Chorus is of slave women. Ironically, though dressed as 'libation bearers' they will perform the opposite of the placatory libation ceremony they were sent to do by the queen.

The queen's terror: "dead men stir in the earth"
But the Chorus cannot pray for her, as instructed.
The CHORUS recapitulates the murder, the polluted house, its history.(57)
Seeing Justice at work, which they will serve.
Though from the Troy Agamemnon destroyed, they switch loyalties
from their tyrannical mistress to the dead king. Agamemnon, now dead,is 'rehabilitated'.

3. First Episode (57-66)
Electra, uncertain, calls on the CHORUS for advice and, after some hesitation, they advise her, clearly, to disobey the queen and pray for her death. So they devise an anti-ritual (58), calling, like Orestes to Hermes and then to the two fathers, above and below. Their prayer (61) is for Vengeance. not appeasement.

The tokens of identification. (Euripides will have some fun with this.) Orestes hair and footprint match Electra's. The point is to show a god at work, that their arrival at the grave coincides with another, and with one miraculous 'sign' after another (63). And, of course, there is an irony in the fact that while Electracan hope from the 'signs' she distrusts the actual man, Orestes. As she walks on Orestes footprints, she walks into him. (61-62) Both Sophokles and Euripides will remove the improbabilities from the scene in their Elektra plays.

The emotional meeting of brother and sister, would have been chanted to music, would be almost ‘operatic’ (62-65) especially as, later (63) it is accompanied by the Chorus.

The two surviving oppressed children meet at the grave of the father. Electra does not appear in Homer’s version, but was invented by the tragedian Stesichorus. However, it seems it was Aeschylus who raised her to a tragic character: and Euripides and Sophokles take this even further. It was a powerful thematic choice. Not only are they the next generation but also male and female, this time united in love and a common purpose. The earlier male-female here transforms into harmony between human siblings, which will be matched in Olympus between the divine siblings Apollo and Athena in next play. The gods who were at war with each other in the Trojan War now will unite. Aeschylus is ‘refining’ Olympus!!

Why a Chorus of female figures?
The slave women, who are themselves outcasts, are appropriate guides for these children. Their 'endorsement' of the matricide 'softens' the audience's possible disapproval. (A chorus of men approving matricide would not have done so) ORESTES acts under Apollo's command.
“I’ve no choice: I must obey”: His dilemma. He is an exile, and must remain one, until his father is avenged. He tells what he has experienced and what he can look forward to as outcast with no place in any community until he avenges his father..

Kommos Ritual Song at the tomb 65-71
The kommos is the longest sequence in the play This is the tremendous ritual 'preparation' of Orestes by the women. And we note that the Chorus and Electra are more vengeful than Orestes. They are, in effect, the human representatives of his father's Furies. They locate the psychic area of primitive anger and Electra and the Chorus tell Orestes of Agamemnon's mutilation after burial, because Clytemnestra feared the corpse would return - the most primitive of fears.

For the most emotional and 'savage' verses, Orestes is the horrified listener. But it is Orestes who concludes the Kommos as he resurrects the dead father in himself; (Note the fine return of the net image of the corks holding up the net)

2nd Episode
Orestes now sets his plot in motion: Clytemnestra will be beaten by her own stratagem of deception. She was the deadly hostess: Orestes will be the deadly guest:

By cunning they killed a noble king
By cunning they must die themselves (73)

Orestes learns of the dream of the serpent and applies it to himself. The kommos has roused his spirit to plan the killings. Electra goes into the palace (the actor becomes Clytemnestra) As PYLADES is the third actor this tritagonist has to be a quick-change artist: in succession, Pylades, Doorkeeper, Kilissa, Servant, Pylades! This, it seems is the case!

While Orestes, Pylades and Electra prepare the plot against Clytemnestra, the Chorus sings of previous treacherous women, of which Clytemnestra is the last in line.

It is only now that we hear Orestes’ story of his own death. Sophokles Clytemnestra,has to express public grief at the news, yet Aeschylus wants us to know it is feigned. So he creates the role of KILISSA, the NURSE, (78-79) a slave woman who acted the true part of a mother to Orestes, to show genuine grief and to report that Clytemnestra, is secretly glad at the news. (79)

The ‘realism’ of the NURSE’S character and speech has been noted by many commentators. The KILISSA episode is created to supply a dimension of the ordinary human view within the tragic argument. The NURSE’S simple and heartfelt reaction to Orestes’ ‘death’ exposes the false rhetoric of Clytemnestra,'s expressed grief. And this realistic level of the action allows the women to ‘step down’ from the formal role of the Chorus and to dictate action to the NURSE thereby becoming actors in the plot.

The Chorus resumes its formal role with a hymn of victory for Orestes and Pylades who are lurking in the palace, and then shifts to an active role in the plot with the entrance of Aegisthus (played by the Orestes actor?). His unimportance in the drama, as a person, is emphasized by the brevity of his appearance - just to be slaughtered. There is a repetition of Agamemnon situation where Aegisthus returned from outside to be witness of a death of the house of Atreus. It is followed by another repetition of the first play: the death cries within the house (83)

83-86 The Killing of Clytemnestra,.
Orestes denunciation of Clytemnestra, re-asserts the male prerogative, but the scene contains tensions that show this re-assertion is not adequate.Orestes acknowledges he is caught between the Furies both of father and mother. He is aware of more complex issues than the CHORUS which (86-87) sees him as having ended the chain of violence. It is at this point that Pyladesspeaks for the only time in the play and, as critics have commented, it is as if the god, Apollo, is speaking through him:

Remember Apollo, the oracle, the promises
You swore. Better the hate of all on Earth
Than risk the fury of the gods. (84)

By this speech, Aeschylus is able both to acknowledge the terrible nature of matricide and to establish that Orestes is acting, not from vengeance but from divinely sanctioned – even compelled – Justice. [It is an archaic version of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: where the truly moral action is manifest in an action which one’s whole nature might cry out against.]

87 There follows another terrible repetition of the first play when the palace doors open to display, once again, a dead couple with their killer standing over them. It tells us the killing of Clytemnestra has not ended the vendetta cycle: that it will continue until some alternative vision of human Justice is evolved.

Orestes speech: 87-88
The end of the 'double tyranny' of Argos with the death of the adulterous murderers.Orestes describes the nature of their crime, the mother's crime against the children, the treacherous 'net' (88) that trapped Agamemnon (the final version of the net imagery).Orestes’ invocation of the sun and of Apollo attempts to locate the killing onto the plane of divine Justice but his agony over what he has had to do (p.89 – produces an internal, subjective swing of feeling that leads to his sight of the Furies.

Orestes now sees himself as the mind-tormented charioteer 88 as the polluted pharmakos and suppliant to Delphi who has again become outcast, exiled, his situation even worse than at the beginning of the play. He alone sees the Furies: they are not on stage, yet. In this ‘realistic play they are subjective, aspects of his own mind. They become objective presences as his stated crime only in the supernatural world of the next play. Orestes’ exit to Delphi is the first destination of holiness in the trilogy and 'raises' the level of the conflict. This next play is unlike anything else in Greek (or any) drama, in its mixture of a supernatural, grotesque, sublime, ritualistic and divine courtroom forensic: a cosmic action which is then handed over to the civic and
democratic society of Athens to inherit.


THE EUMENIDES
An idea of what the loss of most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides has entailed, is hinted at in the rich variety of the plays that survive: often astonishingly unlike each other. Nothing in Sophokles' Antigone, for example prepares us for the Ajax or THE WOMEN OF TRACHIS. Because we have more plays by Euripides, the variety in his work is more evident. And THE EUMENIDES suggests that Aeschylus' work was just as varied, for there is nothing like this play either in the rest of Aeschylus or in the other playwrights. It is also the clearest refutation of the French neo-classical doctrine that Greek drama observed the "unities" of time and place. In this single play there are three different locations and the time that has elapsed between the first scene of THE EUMENIDES and the last must be months.
The topography of Trilogy

Delphi Athens
Argos Temple Acropolis Areopagus

The four locations of The Eumenides are important. Orestes travels from Argos, in western Greece (the Peloponnese) to Delphi, the national Greek shrine (founded centuries after) and considered the center of the earth (the omphalos): this takes the action out of the time and place of Mykenean Argos by some hundreds of years (and some sixty miles); then east to Athens: first to Athena's temple on the Akropolis, then to the hill of the Areopagus. (All these places can still be visited and are well worth the trip!) Orestes ought to be about 700 years old by the time he arrives at the Areopagus!

This journey in time and space is also a cultural journey, as well as a geographical and chronological one. Delphi, the holy site of pilgrimage is where Orestes is 'cleansed' by Apollo. (As Orestes states p. 108 ll.337-340) This action already has freed Orestes from the bloodguilt, even though the Furies won’t give him up. But he still has to suffer the condition of outcast, for some months.

In a sense, there is no real contest in the trial. With Apollo's sanction, (and Apollo speaks for Zeus) Orestes already is acquitted by the gods. The point of the trial is to have the new laws behind this acquittal accepted by human institutions, which still are rooted in older, vendetta logic. And the court, the Areopagus, as the court set up to try homicide cases, is the one place in Athens where vendetta law needed to be totally superseded by communal law. Therefore, what the action of the third play is about is establishing the principle of communal, jury-law, even in cases of vendettas within families.

Perhaps the greatest single achievement of Greek civilization, on which all the rest of its achievements depended, was the creation of the idea of the polis as the object of the individual's supreme loyalty: set above all other loyalties to kin or tribe (Sophokles' ANTIGONE will show how tenuous this sometimes could be: and we can't understand that play properly unless we see that the audience would, at first, have seen Antigone's defiance of the state on behalf of the family, as dangerous and subversive). ‘We’ immediately 'side' with Antigone: an Athenian audience would have needed more persuading.

The Greeks took this idea of the polis, and patriotism towards it, very seriously. The city became one's true parent: and, as a male-democracy, male ‘parentage’ took over, very early in the warrior-citizen's life, from female parentage. (Pericles’ famous Funeral Speech as reported by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War is the classic expression of this). Hence, perhaps, Greek democracy’s denigration of the domestic and its exaltation of the public arena: the warrior citizen democracy over the domestic community, the exaltation of the male over the female. In the Oresteia Aeschylus takes up many of the tensions within such a cultural development.

No culture escapes fundamental tensions. Greek culture, especially through its drama, was able to openly express and artistically shape its tensions, instead of suppressing them. To say that, in the Oresteia, Aeschylus is dramatizing the cultural traumata that went into the creation of democracy, and that he expected his audience to understand this, fits in with what we know of the culture. The human violations the culture felt it necessary to maintain to sustain the warrior-democracy seem to be something it was aware of and needed to objectify as art. To detect a strong male-female dialectic within The Oresteia is to see something Aeschylus and his audience would have seen as obvious.

And though we definitely are not satisfied with the arguments by which the male principle gets the victory in THE EUMENIDES at least Aeschylus and his audience faced up to the conflict, so that it is no surprise to find Greek culture, later in Plato, adopting a ‘quasi-feminist’ stance, stronger than most would take today: i.e. that there is no physical difference in strength between the sexes so that women are required to fight alongside men in battle, exercise naked with them, become rulers on an equal basis, bring up no children of their own (children must be communally reared not knowing their parents, nor their parents knowing them, and so on).

Indeed, it is amazing how frequently male-female social/political themes recur, in Euripides, Aristophanes and the philosophers. (Aristotle, on this issue, is a reactionary, believing firmly in male-only democracy). They came up with a number of treatments of the theme, both serious (The Republic) and comedic (Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae ) Aeschylus's is only one such approach. Possibly, it was the extraordinarily fertility and rich variety of Greek myth that made anything thinkable. The male-female conflict is part of Aeschylus's grand argument, which also is one about Justice in general

10. THE PLAY
PROLOGUE
This opens with one of the most startling actions in drama. We are at the holy and beautiful shrine to Apollo whose priestess relates the history of how the god peacefully took over Delphi. Aeschylus deliberately ignores the myth that Apollo took it by force from the dragon Python (a Titan killed by Apollo). The place, therefore, is free of violence. The god is described as having the sanctuary peacefully handed over to him by his ancestress, Phoebe. His journey from the island, Delos is a joyful, peaceful one, bringing civilization (roads) to the wild place. The Athenians were the civilizing road-builders!

Apollo, we are told speaks for Zeus. (94). Athena is named as next in importance in the play. Then Dionysos, who shares the sanctuary; (in winter he takes over). More violent installation (killing Pentheus on the way to but not at Delphi). With this idea of the shrine as peaceful, the priestess goes inside and then comes out, in terror, on all fours crying out that the Furies (so far unseen by us) have taken over and are 'polluting' the holy place. 94.

We now see a strong male-female contrast. To one side of the skene are three young male figures, Apollo, Hermes and Orestes. Apollo and HERMES would be behind or above Orestes guarding him. In a hostile group round Orestes., the ancient female Furies. The visual contrast between youth and age is important. This is also a contest between the ‘young’ patriarchal Olympian gods and the older primitive gods in which female deities were also powerful. The play depicts the conflict as between the irrational versus the rational, the tribal vs. the civic.

Apollo has made the Furies sleep, and he now has Hermes protect Orestes. and escort him to the CITY, Athens. He predicts Orestes. acquittal. (The Ghost of KLYTEMNESTRA appears as the dream of the Furies, gradually goading them to wake up, as they whine and whimper like sleeping dogs. Then ends probably the most peculiar Prologue in Greek drama.

PARODOS (97)
The CHORUS wakes up, and suddenly begins its violent Ode. It is now that the audience would see their masks, which would be grotesque and hideous. The theme of their Ode is that of the young new gods having taken over power from the old, just as a new concept of Justice will replace the primitive one. When Apollo enters and drives them out of the temple, he describes them not just as pre-Olympian, but also as unGreek.

You belong where heads are chopped
Eyes gouged, throats slit;
Death sentences, castrations, severed limbs
Stoning and crucifixions............(99)

This expresses the Greek humanist revulsion at ‘non-Hellenic, barbarian’ tyrannies such as Persia. Apollo can only reject them: there is no place for them in his 'rational' concept of civilization. But Aeschylus will say they are needed, in 'sublimated form' as the necessary 'fear' and 'piety' that even rational civilization needs: a profound idea, I think.

The nature of their conflict is one of the fundamental ones of the trilogy. They stand for the rights of blood-kin. To the FURIES, neither a husband nor a wife is as important as a parent or child. The biological-tribal link is imperative. But to APOLLO, the marriage-tie is the more important one. This is because marriage is a civic union, sanctioned by the polis, and created by state laws. It is the basis of civilization. (105). So we have the clash of the new, Olympian agenda ZEUS is bringing into being, and the older, primitive order it must displace. The Old Order, however, is allowed its voice.

Orestes. in Athens some months later (101) At Athena 's old temple, clasping the statue.
He is purified, has suffered and is willing to submit himself to trial. He is, therefore, the 'new hero'. His actions are deeper than his arguments: and his actions will redeem him. {This is true of the whole trial scene: the action of jury-trial, the fact that it is established, is more important than the dubious arguments advanced} Therefore, it is by being willing to go to trial that Orestes already is 'above' the ethical level of the Furies, who now track him down in a spirit of primitive vengeance.

Orestes' reply to the Furies, already reveals he has advanced to a higher level of conflict than they. (107 -108) Their attempt to drag him back to madness and death, therefore, (109-112) already is somewhat futile. Aeschylus has to keep up dramatic suspense to hide the fact there is no real contest. Apollo already has acquitted Orestes. and that is the end of his guilt. The god’s decision cannot be countermanded. No trial is needed for Orestes; but one is needed for the dialectic of the play.

ATHENA appears, to state her view is that this is a test case for the new idea of civilization that Zeus is bringing about.(114) and for this purpose the first law court and jury in history is to be set up, its Justice being the foundation of the polis. To the Furies, this is 'revolution' (115) They (rightly) insist that a 'primitive' emotion, like Fear, has its place in civilization(115) for a purely rational society of abstract Reason will not deter people from wrongdoing. Abstract law without traditional, rooted pieties, is more dangerous and ruthless than primitivism. This will be the dialectic of Sophokles Antigone. Plato believed his rational Republic would need convenient 'myths' to hold it together.

Aeschylus's thought is subtle and psychologically sound: the new order (gods and humans) cannot simply discard the primitive origins out of which Justice evolved. It has to find a 'place' for them. For example, the rationalism of the eighteenth century in Europe, by trying to exclude the irrational, failed to control the frightening Terror of the Revolution and the ‘irrational’ 'reaction' of Romanticism. Tragic art above all needs to recognize the irrational.

THE TRIAL
Much of the 'evidence' offered on both sides belongs to Greek culture and not to ours: and the Athenian audience would no more have seen APOLLO's case as ‘laughably weak' (as some modern commentators have said) than Shakespeare's audience's would have seen the case for the divinity of kings as a weak argument Apollo's 'biological theory' (120) was a current one in Athens: that the mother is the carrier and nurturer of the child, but only the father its true begetter. By Aristotle's time, biological theory will have advanced beyond this. And his 'proof' (114) by pointing to the 'parthenogenetic' Athena would seem no more odd than a Catholic’s acceptance of the Virgin Birth. In any case, the arguments are of less importance than the action of jury trial:117. The jury is evenly divided which suggests that Aeschylus does not find Apollo's argument decisive.

Athena 's summing-up(121), advises against going to either extreme: too much law (tyranny) and too little (anarchy), putting both the 'liberal' and the 'conservative' arguments, which, essentially, still apply for a culture. Orestes., acquitted, is no longer an outcast but can return home. His treaty of friendship between Argos and Athens was a current issue of Aeschylus's time (as was the status of the Areopagus). He already talks of himself as a 700-year-old ghost (124) arising from the past to curse enemies of Athens (like the endless progeny of Banquo and King James in Macbeth).

Apollo exits accompanying Orestes.. He does not proclaim victory over the Furies and leaves Athena with the job of reconciliation.Athena, like Apollo, can destroy the Furies with Zeus’s thunderbolt (119) but, after this pretty effective threat, urges them to be 'reasonable'. The compromise is effected. The irrational fears, represented by the Furies, will have their place in Athens, but in the role of working to support and deepen its laws. The Erinyes become Eumenides, with their own cult in Athens.

The dialectic of the trilogy seems to be this: wisdom grows out of suffering, laws that make civilization possible grow out of primitive and violent conflict, Reason and civilization are 'evolved' not God-given to a rational humanity (as the 18th century Deists believed). Therefore, even the highest level, civilization, if it is to "know itself" (Apollo's maxim") must know its own dark and violent origins and find a 'sublimated' place for these within its culture. ("Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.") Furthermore, these 'primitive origins' of a culture are part of its vital life, reaching down to impulses and energies, fears and pieties, that feed into the present and keep it alive.

In a wonderful close, 'groups of citizens' of Athens lead the Furies in a torchlight procession out of the theater and to their (existing) shrines in Athens: the theater and its drama becomes part of the life outside the theater: the two spaces and times become the same (again unique in Greek drama) as the separation of fiction and social fact is ended. Mythic time and actual historical time blend. The trilogy has journeyed from remote, pre-Hellenic Mykaenae, of 700 years ago, with the torch relay proclaiming the destruction of a city (Troy) to the present theatric instant of the performance at the festival. The mythic figures join the citizens and walk out of the theater in a torchlight procession that establishes the city’s reconciliation with its past.

The Fourth Play: Proteus.
Note: For the idea of a satyr play, the Proteus of the Oresteia see Euripides' satyr play, The Cyklops. Aeschylus gives a broad hint of the characters in the play in the MESSENGER’S account of the missing fleet of Menelaos in the Agamemnon. .In Homer, Proteus is an Egyptian daimon, taking on many shapes at will, and servant of Poseidon. In Euripides' Helen Proteus is king of Egypt. Did Euripides get this idea from Aeschylus's Proteus.? The possible plot of Proteus could be as follows: Menelaos and Helen, estranged, are cast up on a satyr island (or in Egypt) where, in the course of the action, Menelaos might wrestle with Proteus. He would succeed and be rewarded. The plot would have involved a satyr Chorus and a reconciliation of Menelaos and Helen, and thus a celebration of the harmony between the sexes, reunion and fertility