Episode 28: A Mother’s Curse

The Orestia Thus Far

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 28: A Mother’s Curse. This show covers an ancient Greek tragedy called The Libation Bearers – the second play in the Oresteia, or Oresteian trilogy, the most famous work of the great dramatist Aeschylus. Last time, we covered the first play in this trilogy, Agamemnon, and now, the intermission is over, and it’s time for part two.

The Oresteian trilogy premiered in the spring of 458 BCE at the city Dionysia festival in Athens. The three plays won the tragedian Aeschylus first prize in that year’s contest, and seemed to epitomize the spirit of Athens in the middle part of the 400s. As we learned in the previous show, Aeschylus was a veteran of the Greco-Persian wars. He and his brother had charged the Persian army at the plain of Marathon back in 490 BCE, and only one of them made it back. In 480 BCE Aeschylus was on the decks of ships that smashed into Persian ones at the battle of Salamis. Aeschylus was of the generation of Leonidas, Themistocles, and Xerxes. And yet Aeschylus, although much of his life was dominated by the Greco-Persian wars, also thought about, and wrote plays about life after war. The middle play in the Oresteia is about the new generation of men and women who grew up when the Trojan War had ended, and in it, we meet Orestes, after whom the Oresteian trilogy is named.

Before we jump into today’s play – again The Libation Bearers – let’s review what we learned last time about this theatrical trilogy at a high level. The Oresteian trilogy is about a family. To say that this family had a checkered past would be a significant understatement. Its first patriarch, Tantalus, cut his son into pieces and tried to feed him to the gods. Its second patriarch, Pelops, murdered his father-in-law. Its third patriarch, Atreus, after whom the cursed House of Atreus is named, killed his brother’s children and fed them to him. Atreus’ two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, started the Trojan War, and while the boys were off in the east, Atreus’ nephew Aegisthus murdered him. The infamous House of Atreus, in summation, was not known for its warmth and clemency, and it’s important to understand that the children of king Agamemnon, who are the stars of the second and third plays of the Oresteia, were born into a family that was dysfunctional to say the least.

The play Agamemnon, the Oresteia’s first installment, which we covered last time, was about the powerful Greek king Agamemnon coming home, having won the Trojan War after ten bumpy years of leading the Greek armies overseas in Anatolia. Agamemnon, in the Homeric epics, is an authoritarian leader with a big ego whose most redeeming characteristics are that he can fight as well as almost any of the warriors who work for him, and that he is unwaveringly devoted to the cause of winning the Trojan War. Agamemnon, in fact, was a bit too unwaveringly devoted to the cause of winning the Trojan War as, in Aeschylus’ version of the story, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia in order to get the Greek ships east over the Aegean to fight in Troy. After a decade of slugging it out beneath the walls of Troy, the Greeks sacked the city, and Agamemnon made the Trojan princess Cassandra his sex slave. Feeling triumphant, Agamemnon then sailed westward back across the Aegean to return to his home city of Argos.

The Oresteia begins, as we heard last time, when one of the watchmen of Argos sees the watchfire that finally heralds King Agamemnon’s return. And yet before Agamemnon even disembarks, readers of Aeschylus’ play get the sense that all is not well in Argos. The play Agamemnon, after the watchman sights the signal fire, becomes a slow, grinding, doom-laden narrative about what happens when Agamemnon gets home. The king’s wife, in his absence, has taken his cousin as a lover. Agamemnon and his slave Cassandra arrive back at his palace. Throughout the first play, there’s a fair amount of tense back and forth between various characters and a chorus of apprehensive elders from Agamemnon’s homeland of Argos. As tensions and foreshadowing reach a fever pitch, Agamemnon and his new sex slave enter into the palace. Shrieks of agony are audible from within. A few minutes later, Agamemnon is brought out of the palace, dead, his body full of knife wounds. Queen Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus are unapologetic about the murder. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra says, killed their daughter Iphigenia. His death was deserved.

The last thing that Aeschylus’ original audience saw before intermission around noon in the spring of 458 BCE was Queen Clytemnestra, bloody, victorious, and vaunting over the dead body of her murdered husband. The murder was not unjustified. It avenged the death of poor helpless Iphigenia. But Clytemnestra and her lover also killed the Trojan princess Cassandra, herself another helpless casualty of the Trojan War. And ancient Greeks knew, just as we do today, that revenge is a wheel – an ouroboros serpent that will keep devouring its own tail just as new generations seek retribution for the transgressions of their forefathers. So, intermission over – the ancient Greek sun is now up it’s a pleasant spring midday in the theater of Dionysus, and it’s time for the second part of the Oresteia, The Libation Bearers. Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be quoting from the Robert Fagles translation, first published by Penguin in 1979. [music]

The Oresteia, Part 2: The Libation Bearers

Agamemnon had been dead for several years. His kingdom, Argos, moved forward uncertainly, following his murder. At the base of Agamemnon’s palace loomed the ancestral tomb of his father, Atreus. This imposing tomb contained a series of patriarchs who would always be remembered, if hated, by posterity, and its latest addition was perhaps the greatest celebrity of all. Agamemnon’s fathers had mostly killed within their families. But Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus had commenced a war that had taken the lives of tens of thousands.

The tomb of the House of Atreus hulked beneath the ancestral palace of Argos, so that when visitors came to the megaron of Queen Clytemnestra, they passed the stone reminder of the men who had founded the kingdom. This tomb looked only slightly less ominous in the light of daybreak, its unlit altar throwing a long shadow over the paving stones. The play The Libation Bearers starts with this image – the tomb of Atreus and Agamemnon and their forebears, at dawn, a solemn set, and one focused on a dark and ineluctable past. The play’s first action is two characters coming along the pathway that leads to thetomb. One of them is the central character, and the pivotal figure in Aeschylus’ three plays, and it’s finally time for us to meet him.

His name was Orestes. Orestes knelt down and prayed over the grave of his murdered father, cut off two locks of his hair, and placed them there as an offering. Then Orestes looked up. He saw a company of women, dressed in dark mourning clothes. They appeared vivid in the clear light of the early morning. They were slave women, and they brought libations, or offerings of sacred liquid, to the tomb of Atreus. At the head of the solemn column of slave women was another main character of the Oresteian trilogy. Her name was Electra. And she was Orestes’ sister, and the daughter of Queen Clytemnestra and her murdered husband Agamemnon. Orestes saw them coming, but he didn’t stay to speak with them. Instead, Orestes bid his companion to hide behind the tomb in order to overhear what this chorus of women would discuss.

Let’s pause for a second and talk about this chorus in The Libation Bearers. The chorus in the first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, was made up of old men from Argos. These elders had essentially conservative motivations – they were invested in King Agamemnon’s power structure, and they were distraught at his death. At the previous play’s end, the old men of its chorus were ultimately deeply troubled that a woman – Queen Clytemnestra – had killed the king and promoted her lover – the king’s cousin – into a leadership role. Now, the chorus in the second play of the trilogy, which we’re on now, is made up of slave women. This second chorus arrives onstage carrying libation offerings, and the play is named after them – The Libation Bearers. The women of this second chorus are mournful and passive, generally speaking, a more inert, reactive chorus than the active male chorus of the first play, Agamemnon. So back to the play. Orestes and his companion have hidden behind the tomb, and Electra and her dark-clad companions – the chorus of libation bearers – have approached the grave of the murdered king.

The chorus of slave women recounted their long grief at the disintegration of the House of Atreus. They wondered what could possibly come next for the broken kingdom of Argos. And they sang,

What can redeem the blood that wets the soil?. . .
[T]he rampart’s down, a fine house down –
dark, dark, and the sun, the life is curst,
and mist enshrouds the halls
where the lords of war went down. . .
But Justice waits and turns the scales:
a sudden blow for some at dawn,
for some in the no man’s land of dusk
her torments grow with time,
and the lethal night takes others.
And the blood that Mother Earth consumes
clots hard, it won’t seep through, it breeds revenge
[the] frenzy goes through the guilty,
seething like infection, swarming through the brain. (178-9)¹

The chorus of slave women thus reflected on the blighted state of the House of Atreus, and how even though revenge bred revenge in an endless cycle, eventually, justice came to prideful people who sought glory over reverence and piety. The members of the chorus ended their graveside song with a lamentation that, as slaves, they had to serve whichever usurper came to power, and then the chorus voiced especial pity for poor Electra, the blameless daughter of such violent parents.

Electra gazed down at the grave of her loathed, murdered father. She had no idea of what to say to his silent, dishonored grave, and she asked the leader of the chorus of slave women. The chorus’ leader told Electra to pour out her libations for the sake of her brother Orestes, and for the person who would come, whoever he or she would be, to take revenge on Queen Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. So Electra prayed to the underworld, hoping that Orestes would return, and also hoping that she herself would be a better person than her mother had been. And while these prayers were kind enough, Electra also voiced the following wishes. She growled, “For our enemies I say, / Raise up your avenger, into the light. . . / kill the killers in return, with justice! / So in the midst of prayers for good I place / this curse for them” (183). The chorus echoed this wish, hoping for a strong warrior to arrive to take vengeance against the murderous queen and her lover.

And just then, Electra saw it. A lock of curly hair, there on the tomb, the same hue and texture as her own. Electra instantly thought of her brother. Had he had his lock of hair sent there, in order to make a belated tribute to their dead father? If so, he’d done his duty and signified that he’d never return to Argos. But there was more! There were footprints! Electra stood in one of them, finding it the same shape as her own foot, and followed the footprints, and saw, for the first time in years, her brother Orestes. [music]

Orestes Reunites with Electra

Orestes, face to face with his sister for the first time in ages, exclaimed that the gods had answered her prayer for an avenger, and more, Orestes asked Electra to pray that they would succeed. At first, Electra couldn’t believe that her brother was standing before her. Surely he was a trick, or a trap. But Orestes showed her the place from which he’d cut the lock of hair. He showed his sister his garments, which Electra herself had made, and woven with the shapes of wild animals. Electra was, for a moment, moved beyond words, and then she resolved that she’d love her brother deeply – with the love she had lodged in her for their murdered father, their murdered sister, and their murderous mother.

The chorus advised caution. But Orestes revealed his desire for bold action. The god Apollo, said Orestes, had told him to avenge his father’s murder. Apollo had told Orestes how the murdered dead desired vengeance in the world of the living. If one didn’t heed the vengeful dead, Apollo had warned Orestes, the young man would be filled with emptiness, fear, and madness. Besides, Orestes said, Clytemnestra was no fit ruler for veterans of the Trojan War. Orestes wished his father had died honorably in the Trojan War, but the old slave women of the chorus cautioned the brother and sister against fantasizing about what was not.

Orestes conceded that it was time for action, rather than reflection. The chorus leader gave voice to what seemed to be the collective sentiment, that bright morning at Agamemnon’s grave. She said anger seethed in her like a pair of gloomy wings, and a spirit of vengeance filled her. The chorus recollected the extent to which Agamemnon had been mutilated and humiliated at the moment of his death, and made a final prayer for the success of Orestes and Electra. And with this final invocation, the chorus of old women departed the stage, their black garments trailing behind them. [music]

The Brother and Sister Plan

Left alone, you might expect that the long-separated brother and sister might do a bit of catching up. “Hey, Orestes, so, where have you actually been?” Electra might ask. “Oh, you know, around,” Oretes might say. “Went down to Crete. That was nice. I’ve taken up carpentry.” And then Electra might say, “Good for you. I’ve been weaving. With all the terrible stuff that’s happened to our family, it’s really important for us to have hobbies and stay healthy.” And Orestes, “Absolutely. We can’t just spend every waking minute angrily contemplating the past and plotting vicious acts of revenge.” But they didn’t have that conversation. They had a different conversation. Here’s what they actually said, this time in the University of Chicago Press Richard Lattimore translation.

ORESTES: O Earth, let my father emerge to watch me fight.
ELECTRA: Persephone, grant still the wonder of success.
ORESTES: Think of that bath, father, where you were stripped of life.
ELECTRA: Think of that casting net they contrived for you.
ORESTES: They caught you like a beast in toils no bronzesmith made.
ELECTRA: Rather, hid you in shrouds that were thought out in shame.
ORESTES: Will you not waken, father, to these reproaches?
ELECTRA: Will you not raise upright that best beloved head?
ORESTES: Send out your Right to battle on the side of those / you love, or give us [snares] like those they caught you in. / For they threw you. Would you not see them thrown in turn? (489-99)²

So, yeah, there was no, “How have you been?” or “When did you get that nice new tunic?” Just a lot of “revenge, revenge, revenge, kill, kill, kill.” Poor kids. They were, like their father Agamemnon, had been, scions of the house of Atreus.

Clytemnestra’s Strange Dream

Once numerous ireful resolutions toward vengeance had been shared between the two, the chorus came back and made a surprising revelation. All was not well, they said, with Queen Clytemnestra. The reason the slave women had been sent with the libation offerings down to the palace tombs was that Queen Clytemnestra had been having bad dreams. The queen had dreamt that she’d given birth to a snake. The snake, as she nursed it in her dream, tore into her breast so that milk and blood curdled together, and the queen had woken up with a scream. Orestes listened raptly to the story of this dream. And then Oretes offered his interpretation.

Orestes said that the serpent – the serpent about which his mother had been having nightmares – this serpent was him. The serpent had come from Orestes’ own swaddling clothes, and it darted forward and sunk its fangs into her breast, just as he, now a grown up and no longer a baby, would kill his own mother in an act of revenge.

After revealing his ambition to be like the breast-biting snake in his mother’s dream, Orestes explained his plan. He said he’d do everything with cunning and secrecy. Now I don’t know if you remember this, but when Orestes first appeared onstage he had a companion with him. That companion is still onstage. His name is Pylades. Pylades has evidently stood there, right next to Orestes, over the course of the play for the past forty or so minutes of dialogue, and said nothing, and everyone has totally ignored him. So Pylades, the inexplicably silent friend of Orestes, still stood there beside his vengeful companion. Nice job, Pylades.

Orestes said he’d pretend, along with his taciturn companion Pylades, to be from the region of Parnassus. They would use fake accents. The two young men would sneak into the palace and wait for an opportunity to get at Aegisthus. Remember Aegisthus was Orestes’ uncle, who by this time has killed Orestes’ grandfather Atreus, and Orestes’ father Agamemnon, as well as being sexually involved with Orestes’ mother Clytemnestra. For all these reasons, Orestes planned to get his father’s cousin slash stepfather alone, and then stab Aegisthus to death. Orestes cautioned the old women of the chorus to keep his planned assault a secret. Electra said she would keep watch. And then Pylades, the possibly insentient companion of Orestes, continued to say nothing. And soon, the younger people departed from the stage, leaving the chorus of old slave women there to contemplate. And if there’s one thing an Ancient Greek chorus can absolutely nail, it’s contemplating stuff.

The Confrontion Between Orestes and Clytemnestra

The chorus of slave women first contemplated the social evils of female infidelity. They recollected famous women who had murdered family members, and the dread of these deeds. Then, somewhat self-contradictingly, they prophesied how Orestes’ murders would repair his forebears’ misdeeds. In their speech, they pictured a child, using blood to purify past blood, his killing sanctioned by the powerful deities called the Furies.

The song of the chorus ended, and the scene shifted up the path to the palace entryway. Orestes and his companion Pylades looked up at the house of Atreus, and Orestes knocked on the gates for admittance. Orestes demanded lodging, saying that the hour was growing late, and Orestes asked to see the masters of the house.

Clytemnestra appeared alongside Electra, and the queen promised that they would have baths, beds, and lodgings. She asked Orestes who he was. Evidently the fact that Orestes was faking a Parnassan accent made it impossible for Queen Clytemnestra to recognize her own son. In fact, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the fact that disguises, in literature, from the Odyssey onward, tend to work a lot better than they do in real life. Moving on, the dissembling Orestes explained his origins to Clytemnestra, and he said he brought grim tidings – the son and heir of the house of Atreus, Orestes said, referring to himself – this son and heir was dead! Orestes, said Orestes, had perished abroad. Clytemnestra was devastated. After more dialogue, the Queen told the strangers that they were still welcome in the house, and Orestes and his speechless companion Pylades entered the cursed House of Atreus.

The chorus voiced a short speech of hope that all would be as it should be, and soon an old nurse came out of the palace. She had been Orestes’ nurse long before, and she was heartbroken. She recollected nursing the baby Orestes, delivering him, and fawning over his needs. And once asked, the old nurse revealed what had happened in the palace – that Clytemnestra had sent a message to Aegisthus to come to the palace and hear the news.

Soon, Aegisthus, the murderous stepfather slash cousin of Orestes, arrived. Aegisthus asked the chorus of old women standing near the palace entryway about Orestes’ death, and then he went inside. The chorus hoped that everything would go justly within the palace that had been Agamemnon’s. Only, soon enough, the old slave women of the chorus heard a scream from within the palace. Calamity broke out. Clytemnestra burst from the palace doors and asked a servant to give her an ax. Clytemnestra shouted, “By cunning we die, precisely as we killed. / Hand me the man-axe, someone, hurry! / . . .Now we will see. Win or lose all, / we have come to this – the crisis of our lives” (216). And then the palace’s doors opened fully.

Orestes stood there with his companion Pylades, holding a bloody sword, standing over the dead body of Aegisthus. He looked at his mother, and Orestes said, “It’s you I want. This one’s had enough” (216). Clytemnestra voiced intense grief for her fallen lover and co-conspirator Aegisthus. Clytemnestra asked her son for mercy, reminding him that he’d once nursed from her breasts.

The Queen’s pleas finally caused Orestes’ murderous resolve to falter. He looked around, and turned to his companion Pylades. Orestes asked his friend “What will I do, Pylades? – I dread to kill my mother!” (216). And finally, Pylades voiced his first line of the play, in which, interestingly enough, he advised his friend Orestes to go ahead and kill his mother, telling Orestes that the gods would be his enemies if Orestes didn’t murder Clytemnestra. This advice evidently seemed reasonable to Orestes. In fact, much of the rest of the trilogy of plays hinges on this exact moment – Orestes hesitates, but he’s reminded that the god Apollo has commanded him to kill his mother. And so, filled with the sense that he was obeying a divine command, Orestes wheeled on his mother, pinning her down on her lover’s corpse. They had this climactic exchange, this time in the Penguin Philip Vellacott translation.

ORESTES: I mean to kill you close beside [Aegisthus]. While he lived / You preferred him to my father. Sleep with him in death. . .
CLYTEMNESTRA: I gave you our life: let me then live out my own.
ORESTES: Live? Here, in my house – you, my father’s murderer?
CLYTEMNESTRA: My child, Fate played a part; I was not all to blame.
ORESTES: Then here’s another death decreed by the same Fate.
CLYTEMNESTRA: My son, do you not fear a parent’s curse?
ORESTES: A parent! / You bore me; then discarded me to misery.
CLYTEMNESTRA: Sent you to trusted friends. Was that discarding you?
ORESTES: I was born free: you sold my body and my throne.
CLYTEMNESTRA: Sold? Where is any price I got for selling you?
ORESTES: Your price? I will not name him, for I blush for you.
CLYTEMNESTRA: Your father sinned too. Count his sins along with mine.
ORESTES: Silence! He spent himself in battle, you suffer at home.
CLYTEMNESTRA: A woman without her man suffers no less, my son.
ORESTES: The man’s work keeps and feeds the woman who sits at home.
CLYTEMNESTRA: Are you resolved, my son, to murder your own mother?
ORESTES: It will be your. . .hand that strikes you dead, not mine.
CLYTEMNESTRA: Beware the hounding Furies of a mother’s curse. ³

It’s a magnificent interchange of short bursts of speech. In antiquity, literary scholars called this sort of rapid-fire back and forth stichomythia, and the later Latin tragedian Seneca, who imitated classical tragedians like Aeschylus, was himself imitated by early modern period authors like Shakespeare, whose plays are full of whip cracking short lines of dialogue, just like these.

To move forward, Clytemnestra emphasized that matricide was a grievous crime, and that Orestes would be punished severely for it if natural human compassion didn’t stymie what he was about to do. Orestes said this was fine enough, because if he didn’t take vengeance, he’d be haunted by a father’s curse. And then, Orestes dragged his mother Clytemnestra through the threshold into the palace, and the doors slammed shut behind them. [music]

The Aftermath of the Matricide and Arrival of the Furies

That, tragically, was the end of Clytemnestra. She was the sister of Helen of Troy, and in ancient Greek mythology, most famously the Odyssey, Clytemnestra is a sort of dark mirror of Penelope. Odysseus’ wife Penelope is faithful and steadfast. Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra has an affair and kills her husband. Unfortunately, neither the Oresteia nor the Homeric epics give us much of a sense of who Clytemnestra was other than that she was a vengeful mother killed by a vengeful son. But even as such, she is a thunderous character in both the plays Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, having many of the showstopper lines in each production.

To continue with the play, ancient Greek tragedy tends to have murders committed offstage. The chorus of old slave women sang a dark song about the atrocity being perpetrated in the palace. Their response was complicated. On one hand, the chorus leader began the reflections by saying that she felt sorry for both the murderer and the victim. This line suggests that the chorus has some awareness that revenge is a double-edged sword – it certainly pays back a killer for an evil deed, but it creates a new killer, and this second killer, like all killers, has to live with the weight of having committed vigilante murder. In Orestes’ case, the murder was a matricide, and so his psychological burden, the chorus said, would be enormous. That’s one side of the chorus’ response to Clytemnestra’s murder, anyway, and probably the more modern and relatable one – again that revenge is a double-edged sword.

Now, the other side of the chorus’ response to Clytemnestra’s murder was a bit philosophically messier. In a word, they zealously proclaimed that Orestes had done the right thing. The chorus emphasized that the murder of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra had been just. The chorus praised Orestes for his secretive maneuvering. And the old women of the chorus finally said, not mincing their words, that the murder of Clytemnestra had been absolutely right and justifiable.

So the chorus of old slave women, in the end, heartily endorsed Orestes’ two murders. And you have to wonder, there, exactly what the chorus is thinking. The simplest answer is that it’s not Aeschylus’ greatest moment as a dramatist. The chorus of old slave women are aware that Queen Clytemnestra killed her husband because Agamemnon had murdered their daughter ten years before to get the favorable winds to blow his ships to Troy. As slave women, they’re doubly removed from revering the power that King Agamemnon represents. And moreover, as citizens of Argos, and elders who have seen a couple of generations of the madhouse of Agamemnon’s family, it’s pretty difficult to believe that these women are enthusiastic about yet another male head of the household murdering yet another family member. But, whatever we make of it, that’s the chorus’ immediate reaction to the killing of Clytemnestra – one quarter queasy apprehension the other three quarters optimistic endorsement.

To conclude the story, then, the palace doors opened, and revealed Pylades and Orestes, weapons in hand, standing over the bloody corpses of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. If you had watched this play in Athens in the spring of 458 BCE, you’d note a definite visual resemblance – the previous play had ended with the exact same blocking – two murderers standing over the bodies of two victims in the threshold of the palace of Argos. Orestes gazed down at the corpses of Queen Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, and he grimly recollected their crimes against his father. He held in his hands a shroud that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus had used to bind and wrap Agamemnon when they had murdered him, and wept into it. Orestes’ companion Pylades handed him an olive branch, and wrapped him in the robes of Apollo. The implications were clear. Orestes had done the right thing by the god Apollo, who had demanded Clytemnestra’s murder. Orestes proclaimed that he would be off to the Oracle. Only, all was not well.

The chorus, for one, seemed to be second guessing their earlier endorsement of the killing. The chorus sang, “Oh the dreadful work. . . / Death calls and she is gone. / But oh, for you, the survivor, / suffering is just about to bloom. . . Aye, trouble is now, / and trouble still to come” (222-3). And in the midst of the chorus’ increasing apprehension, Orestes looked at the blood on his hands and said, “I must escape this blood. . .it is my own” (224). Orestes said he would flee to the temple of Apollo in Delphi, and leave the whole Peloponnese behind. The chorus bade him not to go. They said, “You’ve set us free, the whole city of Argos, / lopped the heads of these two serpents once for all” (224).

Orestes stared at the old women of the chorus, and then he screamed – a scream of terror. They didn’t understand – and then they saw that he wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at something behind them.

Behind the chorus there rose a pack of monstrous creatures. They were female, and they were called the Furies. They wore black, and their heads had snakes in place of hair. Their eyes dripped with malice. Of everyone onstage, only Orestes could see them, and he knew what they were. They were vengeance personified – primal figures who prosecuted mortals for especially horrible crimes. Orestes knew why they were there. The Furies had come for him. Orestes wheeled, and the Furies, which will be at the center of the next play, chased him offstage.

The chorus of old women, as this second part of the Oresteia comes to a close, had run the gamut between endorsing Orestes’ matricide as an act of divine justice, and worrying that the estranged prince might have gone too far. And in the play’s closing lines, the old women of the chorus seem to clearly understand, for the first time, that the endless cycle of slaughter that has begun in the House of Atreus is a cycle that will not, and cannot be stopped with more killing. Their closing lines capture this realization. The old slave women sang, “Where will it end? – / where will it sink to sleep and rest, / this murderous hate, this Fury?” And that’s the end. [music]

The Hounds of a Mother’s Curse

So you’ve just heard the second part of Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy, The Libation Bearers, a play about old slave women bringing libation offerings to the grave of the dead and disgraced king, Agamemnon, and the revenge of Agamemnon’s son and daughter against their mother and her lover. Two down, one to go. If this were the day that the Oresteia premiered, it would be the middle of the afternoon, and we’d stretch our legs again, shoot the breeze with some other Athenians, and perhaps have our first cup of wine for refreshment. Down in the orchestra, the staff would be changing sets, and the bigwigs who organized the festival would be hobnobbing, and Aeschylus, in his late 60s, would be holding court and shaking hands, too.

During this second intermission, because The Libation Bearers has a female chorus of slaves, and ultimately concerns a mother, put in an extremely difficult position, what I want to do now is talk a bit about women in the drama of classical Athens. If you were taking a course on classical Greek drama, this subject would come up during several class periods, because the plays that the Athenians watched during the Dionysian festivals of the 400s BCE were full of compelling, powerful female figures. The Oresteia is no exception. Queen Clytemnestra is the most prominent example you’ve seen so far. Queen Clytemnestra is evidently expected to tolerate the blood sacrifice of her beloved daughter and then embrace her murderous husband and his foreign concubine after he spends ten years away from home, perpetuating the events of the Iliad. Instead, Queen Clytemnestra and her lover kill Agamemnon and Cassandra, and spit in the faces of the disapproving old guard of Argos. You might not go out for ice cream with Queen Clytemnestra, but it’s generally agreed that she’s a powerful, memorable character.

At the end of The Libation Bearers – again the play we just read, Clytemnestra has been replaced by the Furies, those primal female monsters who cause even vigorous young Orestes to scream in terror. The Furies, also, are part of the large arsenal of formidable women in Ancient Greek theater. Later plays that we’ll read during this season – Antigone, Medea, the Bacchae, and Lysistrata, are all full of willful, independently minded women who don’t shy away from a fight – often for the welfare of their families or homes, regardless of the consequences. The robust, vigorous women of classical Athenian drama, particularly the human ones, have been a source of fascination within the plays for a long time.

Just before she is killed, Queen Clytemnestra tells Orestes “the hounds of a mother’s curse will hunt you down” (217-18). It’s one of the most memorable lines in the play. On one hand, it means that the exceptionally heinous crime that Orestes has committed – matricide – will result in him being persecuted by the terrifying, snaky-headed agents of justice called the Furies. But in her promise of “a mother’s curse,” Clytemnestra is also talking about her own curse – the curse of being a mother. The Libation Bearers is filled with references to bosoms, childbirth, breast milk, and caring for infants, maybe most memorably, in the strange dream the queen has, in which her breast is bitten by a snake. Queen Clytemnestra, a mother, a murderer, an adulteress, and, ultimately, a victim, is today understood as one of the most compelling figures in ancient Greek tragedy. But what would ancient Greeks have thought about her? It’s time for us to consider, as best we can, what Aeschylus’ audience would have made of Queen Clytemnestra on the springtime afternoon of 458 BCE, when The Libation Bearers first premiered.

What I’m going to do in the remainder of this show is to tell you a bit about the lives of Athenian women during the mid-400s, when the Oresteia was produced. And then I’ll talk about Clytemnestra and other commanding female characters in classical Greek theater, and how we can make sense of them in the context of this history. We’ll be moving from literature into history for a moment, and we’ll start by going back in time. [music]

Women in Classical Athens

For a long time, we’ve been looking for a matriarchal society in ancient history. We’ve looked for one on the island of Crete and the riverbanks of Sumerian Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age. We looked for traces of a matriarchal society in the stone female figurines of Neolithic Eurasia. That desire – the desire to gaze back into antiquity and find a different way of organizing power between men and women – has informed the way we’ve read ancient Greek dramatists like Aeschylus. Women are heavyweight characters in ancient Greek tragedy and comedy, and ancient Greek epics, too. But close analysis of archaeological finds and architecture, along with careful scrutiny of ancient writings – like law codes, philosophical treatises, orations, poems and plays – almost all of this extant material suggests that if we want to find a place and time in the ancient world that afforded relatively equal rights to men and women, classical Athens is not – not even by a long shot – a good place to look.

I think that the best way to introduce the rigidity of the gender divide between men and women of Aeschylus’ time is to talk about female infanticide. A classic study found that about one in five female babies were killed shortly after birth in classical Athens.⁴ This was not a custom practiced by Jews, Egyptians, or Germanic tribes.⁵ In the mid-400s in Athens, however, killing female babies was commonplace.

As with other historical periods that have practiced female infanticide, its justification in Classical Athens was economic. A female baby would neither be able to own property, nor land. No wealth could transfer through her down to a subsequent generation. She would not be able to attain any distinction in a career. At the time of her marriage, she would necessitate a dowry appropriate to her husband’s social class. Athenian women, then, put simply, lived in a patriarchal society, and had significant disadvantages, not the least of which was that they were substantially less likely to survive infancy. Accordingly, some of the attendees of the first staging of the Oresteia would have arranged for their newborn daughters to be killed. If their daughters survived infancy, these daughters led very different lives than those of their brothers.

In ancient Athens, male citizens’ sexual liberty began at an early age, and never ended. Men were generally supposed to be married around thirty, and girls, around the age of 14. Some later philosophers proposed a later date of marriage for women – the Spartan age was 18, and that certainly seemed to produce healthier young mothers and children. Whatever the exact numbers, men were marrying girls often half their age. The result was a higher rate of deaths in childbirth, and a significant experiential and educational gulf between men and their far younger wives. This age discrepancy affected marriage as an institution, and more generally, culture in ancient Greek civilization. When you have a system in which women are not educated, and men marry teens half their ages, it’s easy for intellectual asymmetries caused by culture to be mistaken for intellectual asymmetries caused by nature. Probably the most famous instance of misogyny in early Greek literature is a poem by the seventh-century poet Semonides, in which Semonides elaborately catalogs women into different tribes – messy pigs, crafty foxes, noisy, intrusive dogs, dirt, donkeys, prissy mares, ugly monkeys, or, at best, industrious bees.⁶

Young marriage and childbearing resulted in a gulf between the life expectancies of men and women in classical Greece, with men living an average of 45 years and women around 36.⁷ The hazards of being a very young mother were largely responsible for this discrepancy, but another reason was the extent to which female Athenian citizens were expected to be physically confined. Men’s lives were spent in the places that we today associate with classical Athens – the agora, the marketplace, the gymnasium, and public buildings in and around the city center. Their wives’ lives, however, were generally spent at home. Even within their own homes, like Penelope does in Homer’s Odyssey, classical Athenian women lived in rooms away from the street, and, if the house had multiple stories, in the highest one, furthest removed from contact with the outside world. Athenian wives, in order to emphasize their aristocratic pedigree, wore white lead makeup and frequently used parasols when on foot outdoors. But venturing forth was the exception, rather than the rule. A trip to the marketplace, or even public fountain, were opportunities for social intercourse that might lead to gossip or worse – extramarital affairs.

Classical Athenian men and women, then, were organized into rigidly separate groups. There were women who could pass between the groups – in the case of classical Athens, a class of courtesans enjoyed some degree of social freedom. But as with so many other patriarchal societies, women in classical Athens did not enjoy the freewheeling and flexible lives of their male counterparts.

Let’s get back to the first two plays of Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy, Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers. The question Aeschylus’ readers have often asked is this. How did a brazen, confident character like Clytemnestra emerge from this heavily patriarchal society? Why are the powerful Furies – the divine agents of justice who explode onto stage at the end of The Libation Bearers ¬– why are these deities women? Speaking of such, if Athens was so obviously invested in the primacy of men, why was it named after Athena, and why were some of Athens’ most important rituals, like the annual Panathenaea, and the Eleusinian Mysteries, and the Thesmophoria, centered on the female deities Athena, Demeter, and Persephone?

Ancient Greek Gods and Goddesses – Some General Differences

Let’s talk about the deities first. People tend to remember ancient Greece’s deities. You’ve got the lightning guy, the ocean guy, the smith guy, the wise owl chick born from the lightning guy’s head, the war guy, the love girl, and the lightning guy’s jealous wife. There’s just something timelessly archetypal about these Olympian gods – we tend to remember them. But over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, classics scholars started exploring some patterns in the differences between the gods and goddess of ancient Greek religion.

When you tell Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite, Poseidon, and the gang to stand in line from tallest to shortest, you don’t immediately distinguish different roles for the genders. There are gods who fight, like Zeus, and Ares. There are goddesses who fight, like Athena and Artemis. Gods and goddesses are engaged in marriages, like Zeus and Hera, or Aphrodite and Hephaestus. Gods and goddesses both secure alliances with mortals, helping them and playing favorites during the Homeric epics. That Athena, wise and powerful patron of Odysseus and Athens – isn’t she an emblem of a commanding, confident woman if there ever was one?

The answer is yes, of course, absolutely. But there are some interesting discrepancies between ancient Greek gods and goddess, just below the surface. Sarah Pomeroy’s book Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, which was first published back in 1975, took a good, long look at the boys and girls of the Olympian pantheon and made some observations. Stories of male gods who sleep around with mortals are all over the place. Zeus has sex with every single living thing on the planet, and an alarming number of stories about him involve some part or other during which he removes his thunderpants and rapes someone. Similarly, Apollo spends a fair amount of time running around with his pants around his ankles, and there are stories about the various rapes committed by Poseidon, Hermes, and Dionysus. So, in summation, the stories that ancient Greeks told about the male gods did not place much emphasis on male fidelity or chastity.

Let’s consider major female deities of ancient Greece. Hera is married, and remains loyal to her untrustworthy husband. Aphrodite is married, and in one of the most famous myths about her, she has sex with Ares, but is caught in the act by her husband Hephaestus and humbled before the rest of the pantheon. Otherwise, Athena is a virgin. Artemis is a virgin. Hestia is a virgin. Demeter might have stayed a virgin, but was raped by Zeus and then gave birth to Persephone. So among the girls, we have three virgins, one loyal wife, one victim of sexual assault, and one mostly loyal wife. And among the boys we have no virgins, but instead a squad of liberties who more or less do what they want with impunity.

This is a striking discrepancy. When classicists started looking carefully at the Olympian Pantheon, what scholars like Sarah Pomeroy noticed was that the gender relations of this pantheon seemed to closely resemble the way that men and women were organized in Ancient Greece. Gender relations in Aeschylus’ time were structured to afford maximum enjoyment and freedom to male Athenian citizens at the expense of everyone else. A concise statement written an orator scholars call Pseudo-Demosthenes sums up the situation of the Athenian male: “We have mistresses for our enjoyment, concubines to serve our person, and wives for the bearing of legitimate offspring.”⁸ The quote concisely demonstrates how Athenian males thought of female social classes primarily in terms of how each was to be used for sex. Mistresses, or educated prostitutes, were to be paraded around on social occasions. Concubines, probably house slaves, were to be used for immediate sexual gratification. And wives were to be confined at home and slept with around three times per month, a sufficient number, according to the laws of the Athenian lawmaker Solon, for the production of legitimate offspring.⁹

Ancient Greek gods and goddesses, then, with their stories and sexual politics, reflected the asymmetrical norms of classical Athens. Zeus is an unapologetic lecher, and his male relations follow his example, but ancient Greek goddesses, by contrast, are more self-restrained, many of them altogether chaste. Ancient Greeks noticed this discrepancy. In Homer’s Odyssey, the nymph Calypso grumbles to Hermes, “You cruel, jealous gods! You bear a grudge / when any goddess takes a man / to sleep with as a lover in her bed” (5.118-20).¹⁰ Zeus, Calypso knows, wants her lover Odysseus to go back to Ithaca, and she cites examples of the hypocritical father of the gods restraining goddesses from enjoying themselves. Calypso wants to do what the male gods do, and in ancient Greece’s most famous epic, Calypso points out the double standard which we’ve been discussing.

Ancient Greek society did not allow for the widespread existence of very many Calypsos, apart from the small courtesan class who served as mistresses to aristocrats of a certain station. And yet ancient Greek literature, including texts that we’ve read in our podcast, is haunted by the presence of terrifyingly powerful women. The Trojan War began, in the lost epic called the Cypria, because a goddess called Eris brought an apple to a legendary wedding. Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite all wanted it, and when the mortal hero Paris chose Aphrodite as the fairest, a schism tore through the most powerful goddesses, and the Olympian pantheon fell into the power blocs we see in the Trojan War. The story of this war involves the participation of both gods and goddesses. At its end, the reason Zeus ultimately favors Greece is that he has promised Achilles’ mother Thetis victory for the westerners. Women also propel the action of the Odyssey. Penelope is an enigma, but whatever she is, and whatever she knows, 108 suitors are buzzing around her palace trying to marry her, and Odysseus literally goes through Hades to get back to her. More than Penelope, though, Athena drives the action of the most famous story from ancient Greece. In Book 1, when Athena convinces Zeus to ignore his brother Poseidon’s rage against Odysseus and let her get Odysseus home, Zeus shrugs, and his daughter jumps into action for the next 12,000 lines.

In ancient Greek plays that we will read in upcoming episodes of this season, we will meet characters like Medea, the Maenads, and Lysistrata, who dominate the events of the plays in which they star. Over and above the Olympian pantheon in ancient Greek cultural history, writers from Homer onward occasionally mentioned the Fates, or Moirai, three weavers to whom sometimes even Zeus has to bow down, and when Plato wrote the Republic, a century after Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the deity Ananke, the mother of the fates, is at the apex of the afterlife. To be clear, Zeus was the patriarch of ancient Greece’s gods. But to be equally clear, there are dozens of stories in which Zeus gets put on the bench, and goddesses and fates seem to have more sway over the cosmos.

In the stories that have come down to us from the ancient Aegean world, as a rule, women are not the sexual buccaneers that men tend to be. Nonetheless, it’s hard to read a play like Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers and conclude that gender relations in classical Athens were a settled issue. Brassy and impenitent, Clytemnestra butchers the most infamous blowhard of the Trojan War. The murder of Agamemnon, in Homer as well as Aeschylus, is understood as a piece of gruesome treachery. Even so, Clytemnestra does not go down meekly in Aeschylus’ plays, and as the chorus of The Libation Bearers zigs and zags and tries to find a way to condone Orestes’ killing of his mother, all of a sudden, the most menacing beings in all of Greek mythology show up, and as it turns out, the Furies are women, and they’re on the warpath for a matricide, even though they were evidently perfectly alright with Clytemnestra killing her husband.

We’ll talk more about the Furies next time, but let me tell you about them briefly, since we’re on the subject of female divine beings in ancient Greek literature. The Furies, in later classical literature, were the scariest creatures in the cosmos. The Roman poet Virgil, the most famous reader of Homer, ever, describes the fury Tisiphone, standing atop an iron turret in the underworld, “swathed in a blood-dripping mantle. . .Sleeplessly, day and night. . .Tisiphone, armed with her lashes, / Leaps up to whip [sinners] herself, thrusts her left hand, teeming with angry / Snakes, at their faces, then calls in her armies of merciless sisters” (6.555-6, 570-2).¹¹ A century after Virgil’s Aeneid, another Roman poet, Statius, wrote about the Furies with similar death metal rhetoric. In his epic poem, the Thebaid, once the Furies are unleashed on earth, the gods depart, not wanting to see the carnage that the furies are capable of. And so when one errant woman, Clytemnestra, goes away at the end of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, the agents of divine justice who pursue her murderer are women. The Oresteian trilogy ends with the arrival of another woman, the goddess Athena, who, just as she does in the Odyssey, drives events to their conclusion. [music]

Coda: Helen, the Dark Angel

The Oresteia’s women – Clytemnestra, the Furies, and Athena, are difficult to ignore. Patriarchal though Aeschylus’ society might have been, the trilogy that won Athens’ main theatrical festival in 458 BCE had as its most powerful characters a trio of ax-wielding, knuckle cracking, bicep-flexing women who together kill the most powerful Greek king and then spank his son around around like an errant child. And in fact, there’s a fourth female heavyweight in the Oresteia. She hangs behind the story of all three plays like a dark angel. She was the thing over which the Trojan War was fought. She was Clytemnestra’s sister, and the aunt of Orestes and Electra. And her name was Roger. Just kidding, her name was Helen.

References to Clytemnestra’s sister Helen are all over the Oresteia plays. In a famous passage from the first play, Agamemnon, the chorus compares Helen to a lion. Now, lion similes are all over the Homeric epics. They’re used so often that they eventually get tiresome. Agamemnon fights like a lion. Achilles is as fierce as a lion. Hector is as undaunted as lion, etc. etc. But Helen’s lion simile is different. Here’s the chorus of Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon talking about Helen, and comparing her to a lion – this is the Penguin Philip Vellacott translation.

There was a shepherd once who reared at home
A lion’s cub. It shared with suckling lambs
Their milk – gentle, while bone and blood were young.
The children loved it; the old watched and smiled.
Often the shepherd held it like a child,
High in his arms; and often it would seek
His hand with soft eyes and caressing tongue,
Tense with the force of hunger. But in time
It showed the nature of its kind. Repaying
Its debt for food and shelter, it prepared
A feast unbidden. Soon the nauseous reek
Of torn flesh filled the house; a bloody slime
Drenched all the ground from that unholy slaying,
While helpless weeping servants stood and stared.
The whelp once reared with lambs, now grown a beast,
Fulfills his nature as Destruction’s priest! (721-36)¹²

So, the old men of Argos say in the play Agamemnon, Helen was like a baby lion, taken in and coddled, until a point at which it realized its true nature, and it tore its keepers to pieces. The old men of Argos, as they speak these lines, obviously remember the Trojan War, and express their shock at how something so comely and so pleasant, and so seemingly harmless could ultimately send so many people to Hades.

Later in the play Agamemnon, after Agamemnon has been murdered, the elders of Argos blame the murder squarely on Helen. The old men muse, in the Robert Fagles translation,

Woman made him suffer, woman struck [Agamemnon] down.
Helen the wild, maddening Helen, one for the many,
the thousand lives you murdered under Troy,
Now you are crowned with this consummate wreath,
the blood that lives in memory, glistens age to age.
Once in the halls she walked and she was war,
angel of war, angel of agony, lighting men to death.¹³

The chorus there tells a familiar story. Just like Eve ate that apple, or Pandora appeared with her jar, Helen committed an initial indiscretion that doomed legions of people to suffering and death. It’s all her fault, the chorus emphasizes – all the tragedy of the Trojan War was due to a woman. Only, Clytemnestra won’t hear any of it. Clytemnestra, defending her sister, tells the old men of Argos,

Pray no more for death, broken as you are.
And never turn your wrath on [Helen], call her
the scourge of men, the one alone
who destroyed a myriad Greek lives—
Helen the grief that never heals. . .
Now you set your judgment straight. (164)

In these lines, Clytemnestra demonstrates that she knows what all of us who have read the Iliad know. The Trojan War had many causes. A major cause was that the Atreus brothers, Agamemnon and Menelaus, wrangled together an army to go and retrieve Menelaus’ wife Helen. So Helen does bear some responsibility. But when Clytemnestra hears her sister being maligned as the sole cause, Clytemnestra vituperates the elders for blaming the most terrible war in Greek literature on her sister Helen alone. She knows her sister’s role in the war was powerful, but she also vents her disgust that the old men are using Helen for a sole scapegoat. Of all the things to appreciate about Clytemnestra as a character, her loyalty to her sister, and her refusal to let men explain away the Trojan War as the misdeed of a woman are high on the list. [music]

The Oresteia‘s Theory of Motherhood

Classical Athens was not a place and time where men and women were equals. As in so many other ancient societies, women were barred from important positions in statecraft, from political participation, and they led very different lives from those of than their male contemporaries, if they even made it past the filicidal practices common in ancient Greece and many other civilizations in antiquity in the first place. Especially at the level of the aristocracy, women’s days and weeks were tightly restricted. Surely, as in all patriarchal societies, there were happy marriages and families, and couples who, like Odysseus and Penelope, generally seem to respect and appreciate one another’s minds and merits. Nonetheless, the deck was stacked against girls at birth, who had fewer choices, less potential to earn income, and lived at the mercy of their husbands’ temperaments, merits, and rises and falls in fortune.

However, as we’ve just been discussing, although the majority of classical Athenian women led more constrained, subjugated lives than their free male counterparts, classical Greek literature shows something else. Around and among the fictional kings and warriors of Homer and his successors, female characters have exhilarating, explosive roles. The mostly male attendees of The Libation Bearers and other ancient Greek plays saw a different world than their own when they looked down onto the stage They looked down from the stands and observed a world where goddesses outmaneuvered gods, where queens axed kings, where justice was embodied by Furies, and moreover, where a host of all sorts of female characters did things that real Athenian women did not. Theater, always, is an imaginative laboratory for what might be, and perhaps, gazing down at the great many goddesses and heroines of ancient Greek myths, classical Athens from time to time revealed a suppressed vision of a society structured very differently, smoldering just beneath the surface of the way things had always been, and the way that things would continue to be, as electrifying as it was commonsensical.

But, it’s important not to be presentist here – in other words, not to overlay modern values too much on ancient literature. Classical Athens was a man’s world, and the norms of theatrical fiction didn’t ultimately represent the rules that ran ancient Greek civilization. Clytemnestra, midway through the Oresteia, acts with agency and even speaks up to defend her maligned sister, but in the end, she is a disloyal spouse. Her husband killed their daughter for personal gain, but killing daughters for personal gain was something that Athenians did, and when Clytemnestra acted to avenge the filicide, she upset the ancient Mycenaean order reflected in the Homeric epics, as well as the norms of Athenian civilization in the 400s BCE. The women who replace her in the story are avenging furies and a virginal goddess, and not, certainly, a human woman such as Athenian theatergoers actually knew.

While the Oresteia rumbles with some evidence of latent feminism, the trilogy, unsurprisingly, reflects the social order of classical Athens, with all of its ancient superstitions and pseudoscience. In fact, famously, the Oresteian trilogy presents a theory of human gestation – how women become pregnant, and how pregnancy works – that, to put it charitably, has not aged well. Since this program is called Episode 28: A Mother’s Curse, and it’s all about one of Greek literature’s most imposing matriarchs, let’s wrap up by hearing what the Oresteia has to say about how motherhood works. The Oresteia makes a pretty bold claim about motherhood. Aeschylus’ 458 BCE trilogy maintains that motherhood does not exist. Here is the god Apollo’s dictum on motherhood, which we will revisit in the next show, in the Fagles translation. Apollo states,

The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life – the one who mounts.
She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps
the shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.
I give you proof that all I say is true.
The father can father forth without a mother.
Here she stands, our living witness.¹⁴

And following this speech, Apollo gestures to Athena, (who’s standing there in that scene) who was, according to legend, born directly from Zeus, without the aid of a woman. So, again, the theory voiced in the Oresteia is that women are just incubators for male seeds, and males are the root of all human life. If Athena has an opinion on this subject in the play, by the way, she says nothing about it.

Did ancient Athenians of Aeschylus’ generation really believe that men were the unitary source of life? Did they have no explanation for children who resembled their mothers more than their fathers? We don’t know. The point here is that for all of the redoubtable Clytemnestras and Athenas who stalked the stages of classical Athens, ancient Greek plays were still products of their time and place. The theory of conception and gestation that Apollo voices toward the end of the Oresteia makes the killing of a king, who gave life, a far severer crime than the killing of a queen, who merely nurtured life. Yet even so, within this chauvinistic logic of the middle part of the Oresteia, there is a seething tension. Queen Clytemnestra’s earsplitting execration, which forms the climax of the play that we read today, reflects the many grievances of classical Athenian women. In Aeschylus’ Athens, mothers were not only cursed to confinement and surrogate citizenship. They were also cursed, according to ancient scientific theory, into not being mothers in the modern sense at all. [music]

Moving on to The Eumenides

So that completes our second intermission during Aeschylus’ Oresteia. If we were watching this in the spring of 458 BCE, we would wrap up our snack, observe the shadows growing a bit longer, and settle in for the late afternoon conclusion to what happened to the house of Atreus. The actors would be putting their masks back on, and the musicians would be playing lyre and aulos overtures to summon people back to their seats. And you and I would be ready to hear about what happens next in this long story.

As of where we are now, a generation of the House of Atreus has fallen. Agamemnon is gone. Clytemnestra is gone. Their daughter Iphigenia was the first casualty of the Trojan War ten years prior. The matricidal Orestes is now a fugitive of the Furies. Hope seems, to some extent, to lie with Orestes’ sister, Electra. One of The Libation Bearers’ opening lines is young Electra’s prayer, in which the daughter of Clytemnestra says, “Hear me, make me far more self-possessed than mother, make this hand more pure” (183). It is a powerful prayer – a young woman’s wish to end the cycle of violence that has taken the lives of so many of her forebears. And yet the play that we just read together did not end on a happy note. It seems, just as the Aegean sun is dipping slowly into late afternoon, that Orestes and Electra might not survive the next chapter of the story.

Shakespearean tragedies, as you may know, end with piles of corpses onstage, and someone, often a benchwarmer character, voicing a soliloquy that hopes for a better future. But how will the Oresteia end? Will the Furies catch Orestes, and do away with him? Will Orestes escape? Will Electra somehow become involved, and help save her brother’s life? Will the whole story end, like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, with a bunch of dead bodies? Or will it go in a completely different direction? We’ll find out next time, in Episode 29: The Mound and the Furies. There’s a quiz on this episode available in the notes section of your podcasting app if you want to review what you’ve learned. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and if you want to hear it, I’ve got a song for you. Otherwise, see you soon.

Still here? So I got to thinking. Got to thinking about the House of Atreus – that madhouse of incest and murder and all that, and what it must have been like to be born into that house – as the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. And I thought, what if Orestes and his sister Electra took all of their experiences – everything about their family, and sung a song about these experiences? What kind of a song would it be? And I thought hmm. Murder. Clannish blood feuds. It sounded a bit like the Appalachian local color fiction I studied in graduate school at one point. So I wrote this bluegrass song, in which Orestes and Electra sing all about their family history, and why this family history has made them into who they are. I hope it’s fun, and I’ll be bringing you the end of the Oresteia very soon.





References

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8.^ Printed in Pomeroy, Sarah. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, p. 8.

9.^ Plutarch, Life of Solon, 20.3.

10.^ Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, p. 183.

11.^ Virgil. Aeneid. Translated by Frederick Ahl. Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008, pp. 145-6.

12.^ Aeschylus. The Oresteian Trilogy. Translated by Philip Vellacott. Penguin Books, 1959, p. 6.

13.^ Aeschylus. Agamemnon. Printed in The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 163-4. Further references to this text will be noted parenthetically in the episode transcription.

14.^ Aeschylus. The Eumenides. Printed in The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 260-1.