Aeschylus Libation-Bearers, Eumenides

Journal Prompt: Eumenides Debate, 22-Feb

• Note: This is to be completed for the Eumenides class. (Not the Libation Bearers class.)

Please enter into your regular personal journal comments relating to your assigned role in the Eumenides debate, 22-Feb.

(You should by now have got emails announcing group assignments and describing seating — important! — and so on. I'm not asking students to confer with their larger group before class. We will, though, in class break up into smaller groups to prepare informal briefs to share with the "court." That's if you're a lawyer. If you're a judge, we'll have you discuss with one another your views pertaining to the case prior to the arguments phase of class.)

This concerns the principal agōn, or "debate scene," in the play (pp. 255 ff.). As it turns out, that debate is a trial scene, Orestes on trial — more below. What we're going to do in class is to put that trial "on trial," as with the US Supreme Court. We're going to review the merits of the case, not the facts but issues of procedure and principle, to determine if the right outcome was achieved.

For this debate and for the journal entries, we're going to split up into three groups that I'll assign in advance of the class (you'll get an email stating which group you're part of):

1. Lawyers arguing for the defendant (Orestes). Your job is to prove that the decision of the trial court was, indeed, just. What made it just? What is justice?
2. Lawyers arguing for the prosecution (Furies). Your job is to prove that the justice achieved was no justice at all. What made it unjust? What is justice?
3. Five supreme court justices whose job will be to listen to arguments, to interrogate each side, to issue a decision, and to rationalize that decision. What is justice?

• Lawyers: Be ready to respond to arguments adduced by the other side — anticipate them. Be just as ready to argue their side as your own. Be ready also to define in advance what justice is, and to argue against what "their" view likely will be. Be biased, but don't seem biased. Judges: Decide in advance, each of you, what you see to be the chief issues, the chief sticking points. You, if anyone, will need to show the world what justice really is with reference to this case. You can't be biased — we're counting on you!

Text Access

Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Robert Fagles. Harmondsworth, England and New York: Penguin Books, 1984. (Available via bookstore or Amazon-Kindle)

Introduction to Libation-Bearers

The Libation Bearers is the second of the three surviving plays from the Oresteia. It is the sequel to the Agamemnon and prequel to the Eumenides. For the Oresteia as a whole and the Agamemnon in particular, see the Oresteia, Agamemnon study guide.

Characters

• Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns from spending his childhood in Phocis, at the court of king Strophius
• Pylades, son of king Strophius and Orestes' pal, accompanies him back to Argos
• Electra, Orestes' sister, has had to spend all those years at Argos with her mother
• Chorus of slave women, captives from Troy, though emotionally aligned with Agamemnon, Electra, and Orestes
• Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon and mother of Orestes and Electra
• Aegisthus, cousin of Agamemnon and lover of Clytemnestra
• Cilissa, the old nurse of Orestes

Setting

At the grave of Agamemnon before the palace, then at the gates of the palace in Argos. Kind of all in the same place

Imagery

Clytemnestra's dream — how to understand the imagery of the snake, etc.? How does it relate to other imagery in the Oresteia? To anything in Persians?

Not imagery, exactly, but what is the role of (the dead) Agamemnon, and of his tomb, in the action of the play? Does that relate to anything in Persians?

Conflicts

Evaluate the justice of the claims of Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra. Is justice done when Orestes murders Clytemnestra?

Analyze the rhetoric of the agon (the verbal wrangle, pp. 216 ff.); compare it to the red-carpet agon in Agamemnon (907 ff.). How persuasive, and how sincere, is Clytemnestra being here? (PLEASE try to give her the benefit of the doubt!) How about Orestes? How well does he state his case? What in the end prompts him to go through with the deed?

Performance Project: Redeeming the Human

Clytemnestra-Orestes showdown, pp. 216-219.

"Wait, my son — no respect for this, my child?
The breast you held, drowsing away the hours,
soft gums tugging the milk that made you grow?"
(Clytemnestra, Libation Bearers p. 216)

If time permits, we'll talk about how to play the Clytemnestra-Orestes showdown. Has Clytemnestra turned into a monster, as she predicts she will in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis? Is she still human? I'd say, It's complicated, but what do you say?

Introduction to Eumenides

The Eumenides is the third of the three surviving plays from the Oresteia. It is the sequel to the Agamemnon and the Libation Bearers. For the Oresteia as a whole and the Agamemnon in particular, see the Oresteia, Agamemnon study guide.

Title

The term "Eumenides" is nowhere used in the text of this play. It is, though, elsewhere used to describe the Furies-Erinyes. The usual explanation is that the Furies, by the end of the play, will have become "Well-Meaning," or Eumenides: that's the meaning of the word in Greek.

The problem is that we really cannot know what Aeschylus called the play, or even if that mattered in his day. If the Furies get a new name by play's end, it's not "Eumenides" but "Revered Goddesses" (Semnai theoi). Also, "Eumenides" as a name probably functioned not to refer to the Furies' change of heart but as a euphemism, a way to name them without evoking what is terrifying about them.

Characters: Speaking

• Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Through her, the god Apollo makes his prophecies known. (You might say she "channels" him)
• Apollo, the god of prophecy at Delphi, and Orestes' "lawyer" when they get to Athens
• Orestes
• Ghost of Clytemnestra
• Choruses of. . .
  • Furies (in Greek, Erinues)
  • Athenian women to hymn the Furies off stage
• Athena, aka Pallas, daughter of Zeus, and sort of his right-hand "man" in this play. Note that:
  • She has her own sanctuary at Delphi ("Athena at the Forefront of the Temple," p. 232)
  • She is the patron goddess of the city of Athens, "the citadel of Pallas" (p. 82)
  • She's got access to Zeus' ammunition closet of thunderbolts

Characters: Silent

• Hermes, messenger god whom Apollo instructs to escort Orestes to Athens
• Athenian citizens who form the jury at Orestes' trial

Setting

First, at Delphi, west of Athens (about 2-1/2 hours by car), the place of Apollo's oracle. Here, Orestes, hounded by the Furies, supplicates (seeks the aid) of Apollo, his protector. Apollo advises Orestes to have his case tried by a jury at. . .

Athens (pp. 241 ff.), where Apollo and Orestes hope to gain a favorable hearing for Orestes' case.

At Athens, the action first takes place on the Acropolis, the hill of Athena, where Orestes begs the goddess' protection.

Then, on the Areopagus (the "Crag of Ares," p. 262), where Athena convenes a trial to determine once and for all Orestes' guilt or innocence. The Furies prosecute. Orestes represents himself, then hands his case over to Apollo.

Historical Background

Some of this is necessary! The Oresteia, written in 458, followed close upon the heels of important political developments. For years, the democracy seems to have been hampered by a (largely?) aristocratic (and largely anti-democratic?) council called the Areopagus (it met on the Areopagus, "Ares' Crag," a hill near the Acropolis).

Then, in 462/1, the democratic leader Ephialtes succeeded in pushing through a measure stripping the Areopagus of most of its political power; it was now little more than a murder court.

In 461, Ephialtes was killed under mysterious circumstances, perhaps by the anti-democratic opposition. He was succeeded as democratic leader by Pericles.

Are there parts of the Eumenides that might resonate with these political developments? Is there a political message to the play? Something about the role of persuasion, of the voice of the people, in the state? NOTE: The dramatized murder trial is actually held before the Areopagus court, a historical reality.

Mythological Background

The murder trial in Eumenides becomes something of a replay of an age-old strife between (for this play!) the elder, female-oriented gods of Earth (represented in the play by the Furies), and the newer, Olympian, male-oriented gods of the sky (Zeus & Co., represented in the play by Apollo and Athena).

How might this mythological background connect with other aspects of the drama? In considering that, think about various categories of dramatic conflict you've seen so far. I arrange below more or less as they're presented in the plays (that includes ideological equivalences implied by the vertical stacking):

female	vs.	male
civic chaos	vs.	civic harmony
violence	vs.	persuasion
old	vs.	new
justice	vs.	justice

Add to that now GODS VERSUS GODS.

So, how does it all fit together?

Trial Scene

At the heart of the play is the agon, the trial-scene (pp. 255 ff.). What arguments do Orestes and Apollo deploy on their side? What about the Furies? With whom do you side, personally? (We'll talk about that after our mock trial.) How does the voting go — how is a verdict reached, and what are the decisive considerations? How do the Furies react? Why do they buy in? (Because they do buy in!)

ATHENA'S BALLOT. At Athenian trials, decisions went to the side with the most jury votes. If the voting was even for both sides, the decision went to the defendant. That was called "Athena's ballot," and is dramatized in our play by Athena's declaring for the defendant in case the voting came to a tie.

In our play, Athena declares for the Orestes based on her natural bias toward the male (!! "No mother gave me birth. / I honour the male, in all things but marriage," p. 264). DOES IT MATTER THAT ATHENA IS BIASED?

Has this play, along with the procedural innovation it dramatizes, veered away from the previous two in terms of what justice is all about? If so, how?

Resolution (lusis)

Think about the "resolution" (Aristotle's lusis) achieved by the end of the play, where the Furies are renamed the Semnai, the "Revered Ones," and offered a place of honor at Athens, and a job executing sentence against those duly found guilty. . . .

• DOES THAT REPRESENT A SATISFYING COMPROMISE?
• Does it achieve the kind of closure that Hegel (German philosopher) would call synthesis, a way to move forward by resolving the differences between two, ideologically opposed positions ("thesis,""antithesis")?
• Or does the play dramatize what's to be lost in compromising, among other things, the prerogatives formerly accruing legitimately to female powers in the cosmos, Furies included?

Explanatory Notes Keyed into Text

p. 231. Speaking the prologue is the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo and mouthpiece for the god's prophecies. She is in Delphi, at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and is telling about the succession of gods who have ruled over this: Mother Earth, "Tradition" (Themis), an unnamed female Titan (early race of Greek gods), yet another Titan named Phoebe, Phoebe's grandson Apollo (aka, Phoebus — Phoebe and Phoebus mean "bright"). What is interesting is that this account changes the usual one, which has Apollo violently evict Themis from Delphi. Overall, and in either case, the succession myth maps the shift of local lordship from deities associated with the earth (all up through Phoebe) to one associated with the sky (the Olympian god Apollo).

p. 232. Athena at the Forefront of the Temple (Athena Pronaos) is Athena as worshiped at Delphi. She has a temple there, still partly standing, on the road leading to Apollo's sanctuary — "at the forefront." She is also an Olympian and thus strengthens the Olympian sky-gods' claim to this piece of real estate. "And great Dionysus rules the land" — in winter, Apollo was believed to vacate Delphi, at which point the god Dionysus would take over.

p. 232. "The vault" — that's the inner chamber of the temple, where the Pythia delivered her prophecies.

p. 323. "The Navelstone" — that's the stone deemed to be the center of the flat earth-disk. The earth's bellybutton (omphalos).

p. 232. "the suppliants" — in general, suppliants are people who seek the help of gods, kings, folks in command.

238. "Such is your triumph, you young gods. . ." — This is a Fury (Erinys) speaking. Formerly the Titans, a race of gods associated with the earth, ruled the world; now their offspring, the Olympians, do, as a result of a violent war. The Furies are not themselves Titans, but they, the Titans (now imprisoned in the underworld), and the earth all feel an affinity for each other and a hatred for their divine usurpers.

238. "The Prophet stains the vault" — the prophet is Apollo (one of Apollo's functions is to predict the future), enemy of the Furies in a bunch of ways.

240. "Pallas / will oversee this trial. She is one of us." Pallas = Athena, yet another of the Olympian gods. Pallas will preside at the trial.

241. The scene is now the Acropolis at Athens. The Acropolis — "high city" — is where the main temples are. And most of them on that hilltop belong to Athena, the god-protector of Athens, "City of Athena."

244. ". . . you will win myself, my land, the Argive people | true and just, your friends-in-arms forever." This is an allusion to situations current for the play's original audience: the alliance that existed between Argos (home of Agamemnon and Orestes) and Athens (the setting of the Eumenides) at the time of the play's first production. As such, it illustrates how Athenian tragedy, though rooted (mostly) in a mythic past in terms of its story, was typically very up-to-date in theme.

245. "Now hear my spell, / the chains of song I sing to bind you tight." We know in fact that ancient trial litigants (the plays becomes a trial — the first ever homicide trial) would use magic spells to try to tongue-tie their opponents in court. That's what this is: a tongue-tying spell.

248. "The Achaean warlords" — Athena means the Greek commanders. She claims that the Greek victors at Troy have gifted Troy to her. This is a current-events allusion. Athens, city of Athena, claimed the fortress at Segeum, near Troy. Very Fourth-of-July.

253. "And I will pick the finest men of Athens" — Athena means she will impanel the first ever homicide jury. This is, then, the mythological foundation of the Areopagus Court, whose members were "the finest" in terms of the fact that were all ex city officials, members of the elite. This is, then, also a celebration of the city's institutions. The Furies see it as an overthrow of their prerogative.

255. The scene shifts from the mesa-like outcropping of the Acropolis to the nearby Areopagus, the "Hill of Ares," where the Areopagus Council and Court met. The trial starts.

260. Apollo's "you grotesque, loathsome — the gods detest you" — this is language extremely unusual for tragedy and uses a word, knōdala, use nowhere else in tragedy, whether for human or divine persons. Apollo's disrespect for the Furies easily exceeds theirs for him.

260. "Here is the truth, I tell you" — as the commentator Sommerstein points out, the audience for the play would have found Apollo's claim doubtful, namely, that mothers are not, properly speaking, parents or blood relations.

1. Though there were intellectuals who seem to have claimed such things, Athenian audiences — and Athenian juries especially — often mistrusted that kind of intellectualizing.
2. Apollo's argument ignores the Furies' line of argument. The Furies aren't claiming that Orestes sprang from his mother's genetic material (her blood) but were nourished by her blood in the womb — not so far from scientific fact as we now know it.
3. Athenians held the unbreakable bond between mother and child to be extremely special — more special than that between father and child. (The bond between father and child was breakable through adoption.)
4. Athena really wasn't, as Apollo claims by way of example, without a mother; her mother is usually given as Metis, "wisdom." Zeus ate pregnant Metis (absorbed Wisdom) and then gave birth to Athena from his head.
5. Note how the jury will split down the middle: some clearly aren't convinced by the case Apollo makes.

p. 262. ". . . for Aegeus' people" — Athena means the people of Athens. (Aegeus was a mythic king of Athens.)

p. 263. "Just as you triumphed in the house of Pheres" — This is the story of how Apollo intervened in behalf of his friend Admetus, who was about to face death. Apollo tricked the fates to allow another to die in his place. This infuriates Death in Euripides' play Alcestis: it's trespassing on Death's prerogatives. (When you have multiple gods, they do have to respect one another's respective spheres of influence, don't they? Apollo screwed up.)

p. 264. "No mother gave me birth. / I honor the male." I disagree with Sommerstein: these lines do indeed underscore Athena's bias for the male principle and thus for Orestes. But I agree with Sommerstein that there is a deeper issue. Athena is not judging on the pure merits of the case, whatever those are. She is taking Orestes' side because she fears that to do otherwise would undermine patriarchy, the foundation of the whole household, the whole social and political order at Athens and elsewhere in Greece. The court's decision thus legitimizes patriarchy.

p. 265. "The man goes free, . . . the lots are equal." What this means is either that the human jury split half for Orestes, half for the Furies, or that Athena, in throwing her lot in for Orestes, created a tie vote. Either way, Orestes got off.

266. "But I swear to you, your land and assembled host" — Orestes swears that Argos will remain friendly to Athens, another reminder of the historical alliance between the two democracies.

p. 275. ". . . my people born of the Rock King" — that's Cranaus, in myth, one of the very earliest kings of Athens, and a figure who personified "Attica's rough and rocky ground" (Brill's New Pauly).